Illustration by David Plunkert

I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one of our instructors, Sharon, has just told us to imagine a huge rectangular brass nameplate, as if walking us through a guided meditation. “In front of that nameplate is a huge picket fence, and behind that nameplate is a huge white house,” she says. “Through the windows of that house I can see a family. They’re playing—they’re having fun. There’s a chimney. And what is sticking out of that chimney?”

Several people suggest smoke. “Santa Claus?” asks an employee of the Mediterranean Shipping Company, which transports hazardous goods.

“No,” says Sharon. “A huge yellow work glove.” We grow confused; I imagine few of us have worn work gloves in our lives. Sharon continues. “There’s something interesting that that glove is holding,” she says. “It’s an airplane. This is not a normal airplane. Instead of your normal propellers, there are some things that are not normally there. There are tennis rackets. And there’s actually newspaper at the center of those tennis rackets.” We stare at her blankly.

This is a Dale Carnegie Course, a three-day “intensive” designed to equip us with “people skills” for use in personal and professional settings. Sharon’s surrealist sculpture, it turns out, is a mnemonic device for Carnegie’s components of a “real strong conversation,” as another facilitator, Andre, later says. To put the image to use, you ask your interlocutor their name (the nameplate) and then about their family (the house) and their job (the glove). After that, you can move on to travel plans (the plane), followed by hobbies (the tennis rackets), and, finally, current events. “You gotta be careful,” Andre notes about this last topic. “Right now it’s a little politically charged.”

All thirty of us get on our feet to test-drive the script in order to “make it a skill,” as Andre puts it. Giving structure to aimless chatter, we are to understand, will make for conversations with measurable outcomes. After discovering that my conversation partner works for a nonprofit funded by a family of billionaires, I try to sleuth out exactly what his organization does, but in doing so fail to move on from the Yellow Work Glove Stage to the Airplane Stage. Afterward, he tells me that I have done a good job of implementing Principle No. 4—“Become genuinely interested in other people”—but that, by pelting him with questions, I have prevented him from learning about me. I consider pointing out that he has achieved mastery of Principle No. 3: “Arouse in the other person an eager want.”

Different versions of this course have existed since Dale Carnegie, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People and the de facto founder of the professional-training industry in America, first taught it himself in 1912, the year he founded the Dale Carnegie company. In 2020, it claimed that four fifths of the Fortune 500 were clients of its development courses. (Warren Buffett has said that one such course changed his life.) In my session, my classmates include employees of Google, the United Nations Federal Credit Union, the Office of the New York State Attorney General, a hedge fund, and a company that puts special sleeves in gas pipelines to extend their lives by one hundred years. Over the next two days, we would draw “vision landscapes” on flip charts while a Dua Lipa song played in the background; give speeches on our life’s “defining moment” in front of an enormous screen showing a slide reading increasing self-confidence; and learn an elaborate name game called Memory Pegging, which involves at least four different acronyms. “This is the DNA, the Holy Grail!” says Andre. “If you master the art of people skills—oh my goodness,” he sighs. “The world is like an oyster!” We are reassured that, by the end of the course, we will know how to strengthen our relationships “the right way.”

These days, courses like this are in particularly high demand on account of a purported white-collar deficit of “soft skills”—the nonspecialized interpersonal aspects of one’s professional life. Employers face a “soft skills crisis,” announced Personnel Today in September. “Is marketing facing a soft skills crisis?” asked Marketing Week last April. “The world is facing a ‘soft-skills crisis’ as home working leaves millions of workers struggling to interact with colleagues,” the Telegraph of London reported. This “crisis” seems to be everywhere at once, now that soft skills are more in demand than ever, as one Forbes headline put it; management scientists worry about “the discrepancy between employer demand and workforce supply of soft skills,” making the charm shortage sound like an urgent supply-chain disruption. The reports read as if executives might wander into the growing “skill gap” and fall to their deaths.

News coverage suggests that workers everywhere have yet to recover from the isolating effects of the pandemic. Socializing, we are told, is a matter of fitness. “Utilizing those skills is almost like a muscle. If you’re not using that muscle, it can become weak,” the founder of the Swann School of Protocol, a corporate-etiquette school, told the Los Angeles Times. “The COVID-19 pandemic has quickly and dramatically accelerated the need for new workforce skills,” the firm McKinsey & Company claimed in its Global Survey on Reskilling. “The most important skills to develop tend to be social and emotional in nature.” Now that pandemic-era college students have entered the workforce, the problem has only intensified. The accounting and consulting firm KPMG is trying to rehabilitate “lockdown-damaged” Gen Z recruits, wrote the Telegraph, as if Zoom had denatured their brains. Unfortunately, the soft-skills crisis might be part of a bigger problem: the so-called loneliness epidemic, or what The Atlantic has called “the anti-social century,” has driven people to the lowest recorded levels of in-person socializing in our country’s history.

Companies often try to solve this issue by hiring organizations like Dale Carnegie, Swann, FranklinCovey, or the American Academy of Etiquette to swoop in and conduct training courses, or to subscribe employees to asynchronous “online skills marketplaces” where they can complete “bite-sized training modules.” According to a 2023 Resume Builder survey of business leaders, more than six in ten companies claimed they would send their workers to etiquette courses in 2024. Entrepreneurs are sensing an opportunity for innovation: the software-development company Sozo Labs offers virtual role-play training, allowing employees to practice soft skills without interacting with actual people. McKinsey, too, guides companies through “skill transformations,” though I’m not sure I would choose to learn “empathy skills” from the company that optimized ICE.

For a smattering of the other Dale Carnegie attendees, participation is not voluntary. They have been sent by their bosses, and Andre tells me privately that, for some, “their job depends on it.” I imagine that a few of my classmates have behaved in ways that flagged an urgent need for remedial training. Having been in a few meetings myself, I can also understand why some managers would want to pay an expert to file down the ragged edges of obtrusive personalities. If I had employees, I, too, would probably want to like them. But the claims made for soft skills go far beyond fostering a friendlier work environment. In management science, they have been cited as a remedy for everything from the mental-health epidemic to AI-driven job losses, from generational obsolescence to shifts in the balance of geopolitical power. The idea that our human connections have atrophied over the past few years is by no means entirely wrong. But this isn’t the first time that soft skills have been proposed as a solution to a range of America’s problems. Over the past century, the discourse of soft skills has repeatedly been invoked in response to technological and social upheaval. What, if anything, distinguishes our current crisis? And whom do soft skills really serve?

Soft-skills researchers have themselves been mired in their own long crisis. None of them have convincingly determined what a “soft skill” even is, despite decades of research. “There is still lack of consensus regarding the definitions,” a team of management scientists wrote in a 2022 article entitled “Soft Skills, Do We Know What We Are Talking About?” Social scientists patch together definitions from an inconsistent taxonomy of subskills: communication skills, interpersonal skills, empathy, emotional intelligence, problem-solving skills, teamwork and collaboration, critical thinking, flexibility, creativity, leadership and social influence, resilience, adaptability. One group of management researchers attempted to connect the dots in 2023, writing that these skills are “non-technical and non-reliant on abstract reasoning involving interpersonal and intrapersonal abilities to facilitate mastered performance in particular social contexts.” USAID researchers once inventoried a whopping seventy-four different metrics for measuring soft skills; they found that the most common parameter was “self-control.”

A recent spate of popular books also struggles with definitions. Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss’s Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day (2024) dedicates a section to explaining how soft skills are examples of emotional intelligence by another name, only to then describe emotional intelligence as a “skill set.” The New York Times columnist David Brooks, in How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (2023), locates soft skills in a list of “small, concrete social actions”:

disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced.

Ultimately, Brooks contends that it’s largely a matter of effort: “When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively that you’re practically burning calories.”

When I mention soft skills to the occasional corporate leaders I meet through my research, they look grave. They tell me how crucial soft skills are and how hard it is to find them in job candidates, as though they were an elusive species of bird being hunted to death. Yet when I ask what they are or how they’re measured, no one can quite tell me. Researchers note that it’s hard to slot soft skills alongside the more rigorous conceptions we have of “skill”—a category once used to rank industrial workers on the basis of what kinds of machines they knew how to use. When I do encounter real social grace, it doesn’t seem like a matter of technical mastery, inherited privilege, or even virtuosity. It instead feels like a rare gift of real responsiveness—it offers a tiny glimpse of the sublime experience of brushing up against another person’s subjectivity.

Whatever the nature of soft skills, managers are told that the stakes are high. “If you are not an active champion of high-priority soft skills behaviors in your sphere of influence and authority, then you can be sure that the talent in your midst will not buy in,” wrote the management trainer Bruce Tulgan in Psychology Today. In 2015, McDonald’s commissioned a report entitled “The Value of Soft Skills to the UK Economy,” which claimed that soft skills contributed more than 88 billion pounds to the U.K. economy (of which fast-food restaurants are a major part), underpinning about 6.5 percent of it, and predicted that 2025 would see 1.78 million “unfilled vacancies due to soft skills shortages.” It’s unclear how, exactly, the analysts arrived at such precise numbers. But studies like this are in part what has made the soft-skills-training market worth more than $20 billion in the United States alone.

The soft-skills industry has come a long way from 1936, when Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People, which offered a set of cheat codes for both intimate and professional relationships. Personality was becoming increasingly impersonal, something you might obtain from a book. Carnegie’s ideas were a mishmash of earlier writers’ claims—and descended from the Victorian cult of “character”—but he had a unique knack for packaging them for the modern reader, codifying human relationships into a set of universal instructions. He was selling a tool kit that anyone, even those not destined from birth for the Ivy League, could put to use. If one intends to “wear the captain’s cap and navigate the ship of business,” he wrote, “personality and the ability to talk are more important than a knowledge of Latin verbs or a sheepskin from Harvard.” Carnegie’s first order of business was to sow the seeds of soft-skills fanaticism, advising students to “say to yourself over and over: ‘My popularity, my happiness, and my income depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.’ ”

A couple of years later, in a volume called Management and the Worker, the management theorist Fritz Roethlisberger and the personnel expert William Dickson argued that the personnel specialist himself is indeed a type of skilled worker, even if he lacked the technical knowledge of an engineer. Roethlisberger and Dickson were associated with the Human Relations School, a cadre of management scientists in and around Harvard Business School who largely rejected the cold brutality of Taylorism, which optimized time and motion in production. Instead, they reasoned, good managers could create loyal, productive employees by making the workplace emotionally fulfilling. Seen through this lens, the personnel specialist’s skills in “diagnosing any human situation” and “securing co-operation” from workers were valuable—“capable of being refined and taught and communicated to others.” At a time when labor organizing was especially menacing to bosses, early ancestors of today’s soft skills were meant to smooth over workplace frictions, gliding past class conflict.

Then, during World War II, the public went to work building war machines. Researchers had come to understand these employees as akin to the very weapons they constructed: capable of being engineered more or less efficiently. By the mid-Fifties, the phrase “soft skills” was cropping up in Army literature. For military leadership, soft skills came to represent everything that wasn’t measurable in a soldier. It was easy to determine whether someone could shoot a target; it was far more difficult to determine a particular cadet’s effect on morale. “Those job functions about which we know a good deal are hard skills and those about which we know very little are soft skills,” wrote Paul G. Whitmore, a representative of a human-resources research group, in a 1972 paper for a conference the Army held on soft skills—as if the findings exposed a blind spot where supervision failed.

In the wake of the antiwar protests of the Sixties, Army leadership must have felt as though it had lost control. Soft-skills research could let officers bask in the fantasy of measuring and managing what eluded them: human behavior. (Whitmore notes the lack of an “unequivocal theory of operation for people.”) Army researchers had such difficulty making meaning from their data that Whitmore quipped that the domain of soft skills was “an area fraught with the vagaries of ill-defined terms, which must be hacked through with a semantic machete.”

Several months after the conference, the United States withdrew its forces from Vietnam, and the Arab oil embargo and the recession that followed fast-tracked deindustrialization. As companies tried to weather the ensuing economic storm of the Seventies, jobs became more “flexible,” which often meant fewer constraints on managers and less security for employees, who had to be “adaptable.” Skills were turned into the equivalent of Boy Scout merit badges: talismans of employability, operating as the “property of the individual, who then carried them, luggage-like, from job to job,” as the employment scholar Jonathan Payne has put it. In a precarious state, workers needed to “transform themselves into value-creating entrepreneurs,” writes the historian Erik Baker in Make Your Own Job.

Soft-skills rhetoric took root at Chrysler and Coca-Cola alike, making employees responsible for keeping up as traditional jobs began to devolve into gig work. As the pace of work became more frantic, one could even claim that “ ‘pressure management skills’ [were] being acquired,” Payne writes. He narrates how, beginning in 1979, the United Kingdom convened vocational training courses in “transferable” competencies, often for the unemployed, devoting resources to building so-called skills such as “flexibility of attitude and willingness to learn,” preparing people to be shunted around by the freer and freer market.

Meanwhile, as the term “soft skills” crept into the Seventies and Eighties workplace vocabulary, women streamed into the workforce. The soft-skills paradigm seemed to accord with women’s stereotypical strengths, helping them to eventually worm their way into the C suite, as though the skills were a kind of feminist panacea. By the Nineties, the phrase was no longer confined to “the argot of consulting,” as the New York Times had put it in 1988, but was part of everyday household language; by the turn of the millennium, soft skills represented a kind of scientific management of the soul. Managers felt as if they had discovered that human personalities were reservoirs of untapped value; corporations scrutinized the subtleties of interpersonal dynamics for waste and profit. By developing soft skills, an employee could make something out of nothing, magically rescuing efficiency from the hazy realm of feelings and relationships. In this view, the word “skill” proffers hope by implying a learning curve, but it also turns social interaction into an exam. “Every meaningful conversation is made up of countless small choices,” writes Charles Duhigg in Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. “There are fleeting moments when the right question, or a vulnerable admission, or an empathetic word can completely change a dialogue.” Here, failure can mean anything from a boring interaction to a life of solitude—and possibly unemployment.

Unfortunately, soft skills are no silver bullet. One paper from 2005 argued that the concept’s feminist bona fides have created a “glass cliff” in the C suite, with women executives brought in to lead during crises; they are “perceived as having the soft skills needed to navigate difficult situations,” as a Times article put it last July, only to plummet when the company fails. Regarding race and class, soft skills may be yet another way to turn biased social judgments into objective measures of ability, as the social scientists Philip Moss and Chris Tilly argued as early as 1996. In a 2024 paper in Applied Economics, a group of researchers found that “soft skills have an insignificant effect on job mobility.” High scores on “communication skills, time management, and low task repetitiveness” had a mixed effect on wages, and did not make employees more likely to get promoted.

But no matter how little quantitative evidence we have that soft-skills training helps employees, employers still preach soft skills as the key to individual success. If you’re emotionally dysregulated, if your boss resents you, or if you lose your job, it’s your fault for being unskilled.

Our current soft-skills panic, however, is not merely a vintage tactic of oppression from the Seventies, but also a folk remedy for distinctly contemporary social problems. While often described as an aftereffect of the pandemic, the “crisis” is also forward-looking, aided by McKinsey’s claim that soft skills will make businesses “future-proof,” as if sealing them against the biblical floods to come.

For some, that future holds the prospect of being replaced. Entering the workforce during the pandemic, managers fear, left young workers unable to appreciate their coworkers’ humanity, leaving them liable to screw over others in the name of self-care and quiet quitting—a sharp contrast to the purported workaholism of millennials in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Growing up during the pandemic, the story goes, this new generation experienced other humans as clusters of pixels safely confined to a two-dimensional plane. Elder bosses may fantasize that teaching twenty-one-year-old business majors a prior age’s social norms will make the future not only more recognizable, but one in which their expertise is needed and the youth have something left to learn.

The cult of soft skills also compensates for the shifting global balance of power: one 2024 study shows that China and Russia have far fewer research publications on soft skills than the United States and countries in Europe. “Is China Creating a Workforce with No Soft Skills?” asked the British Council, an organization characterized as a “ ‘soft-power’ extension of UK foreign policy,” in 2015. The West’s sense of itself as the bastion of soft skills is a veiled recapitulation of racist characterizations of Chinese citizens as robots, and portrayals of citizens of communist states as automatons—the same stereotypes lurking behind the preoccupation with “character,” that elusive ingredient of college admissions that evaluators have been accused of using to reject Asian applicants.

Some researchers associate the surge in demand for soft skills with the coming of “Industry 5.0”—as the European Commission named an approach to the world of AI, which demands “collaboration between humans and machines”—and an era that will be marked by “diminished interpersonal interactions resulting from the pervasive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic,” as one team of management scientists put it. After all, the thing that makes us indispensably human, nonredundant to the machines we create, is our ability to thoughtfully interact with one another. What do we have that robots don’t? Feelings—at least for now. In Tokyo, a team of scientists is teaching pink robotic gel made of human skin tissue to flash a very disturbing smile.

In an increasingly unpredictable environment, soft skills can encourage a fantasy of boundless adaptability: people and organizations will be able to adjust to anything that could possibly happen. Organizations are advised to cultivate “nimble and adaptable skills at scale” and maintain “skills agility,” continually reworking the competencies of their workers—“adaptability,” of course, being itself a soft skill. Recent articles prize shape-shifting as a competency in its own right—an underlying ur-skill of sorts—and hold out hope that our species can keep up with the world we’ve created. Everyone should be reskilling and upskilling all the time, whether they are doing daylong etiquette courses, microlearning, or nanolearning (“short bursts of instruction to help people make progress in small bites,” as LinkedIn puts it). Employees should be like the ship of Theseus, comprised of endlessly interchangeable components.

But even as soft skills claim to be a solution to automation, they also help you automate yourself, reducing human interaction to an arsenal of techniques programmed into the mind. Soft skills will apparently rescue us from redundancy even as they render human interaction a little more mechanical. Oddly, the crisis is not about how we will operate or control machines. It’s about how we will operate and control one another.

This dynamic reveals a vulnerability, in which an obsession with skills could, in fact, feed into AI optimism, rather than act as protection from encroaching technology. Happily off-loading “monotonous and unpleasant activities” to the robots, as a team of business scientists in the Netherlands describes, we risk spending most of our time dissecting one another’s personalities. Productivity will hinge on“interaction efficiency” and a person’s “Emotional IQ.” They claim that this process optimizes our brains for machines to use us: soft skills “will enable artificial intelligence and robots to use human brain capacity and creativity to boost process efficiency.” The researchers adopt a celebratory tone.

As socioeconomic and ideological gaps widen in the United States, people will continue to find one another inscrutable, infuriating, or hostile, however much everyone softens themselves. In this light, soft skills can be seen as a workplace corollary to centrists’ pleas for a right wing that doesn’t storm the Capitol and a left that doesn’t take up space on the campus lawn. In turn, the demand to “manage conflict agreeably” seems a little asinine when powerful people have few incentives to listen to the disempowered’s requests, however charming they may be expressed.

While employers were fantasizing about harmonious organizations, Elon Musk began gutting entire federal agencies. Musk once talked a big game about soft-skilled leadership. “The supervisor is there to serve his team—not the other way round,” he told Tesla employees in 2017. But after buying Twitter in 2022, Musk led employees to his first “fork in the road,” giving them one day to decide whether to become “extremely hardcore” or quit. One needs soft skills, it turns out, only when one needs things from other people. With their bunkers and independent electrical grids, today’s true elites don’t think they need society at all.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency invokes the same credo of optimization that gave us soft skills in the first place. Austerity and soft skills play bad cop and good cop (and both come with countervailing extravagances—tax cuts and training courses, respectively), but they’re part of the same logic of bad social engineering. Trump’s plan to “clean out the deep state” will leave massive personnel gaps in government agencies that cannot be bridged by mere effective communication, and certainly not by the characters he’s putting in charge, who seem exempt from the soft-skills mandate.

The United States is maturing into a cult of ability, in which current “leaders” explicitly prefer survival of the fittest to inclusivity, let alone collectivity; the historian Quinn Slobodian has compared the new administration’s vision of society to one of its favorite sports competitions, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The quieter flip side of the overt evil of social Darwinism is that none of us are ever capable enough. Bottomless inadequacy organizes our experience in almost imperceptible ways, as when human connection becomes a matter of competence, spawning a culture of socially anxious people so worried about whether they are doing a good job cultivating relationships that they choose chatbots over social events. To feel better about our deficiencies, the relatively able among us train for supercommunication and ultramarathons alike.

“People are saying, like, Dude, I gotta get that edge,” Andre, the instructor, told me, explaining what people want from the Dale Carnegie Course. “I have to be distinguishable. I have to come up with a new idea. I have to manage the change cycle.”

I’ve started to think that improving workers’ soft skills is partly a way to sustain a narrative of social progress at a moment when it would be generous to say we’re running in place. “AI will make jobs kind of pointless,” Musk said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2019. Unfortunately, some people will still have to do them; AI will simply make their jobs even more annoying. Duhigg praises the way some call centers use AI to act as a kind of soft-skills dramaturge, directing customer-service representatives in real time as they adjust their tone to match a caller’s. In this case, it’s the managers who risk becoming obsolete.

Meanwhile, the domain of the crisis of soft skills rarely includes the workplaces where personality is being put to the hardest test: the home, the care industry, and the service industry, where automation is unlikely to make a real dent—at least not until the pink robotic gel that smiles grows arms and legs and something like a heart. As the scholar Jason E. Smith has argued, “low-skill” labor now means work involving people, such as taking care of members of an aging population, delivering takeout, or customer service—work that may require more intensive emotional self-management than C-suite jobs. Service workers have long been paid to mask their real feelings behind a veneer of conviviality in order to, as the sociologist Arlie Hochschild wrote in 1983, “produce an emotional state in another person.” It turns out that if you spend all day pretending to have some feelings and not others, the divide between the personal and the professional tends to break down. You may wind up confused about which emotions are actually yours.

This explains why I felt so vacant after each long day of practicing Carnegie’s principles, prone to staring into the middle distance when among friends. By the third morning, I knew which participants were available for surreptitious eye contact when the density of buzzwords spiked.

“The ‘Magic Formula’—I don’t know how I can use it in my profession,” said one such classmate. We had spent the morning learning a formula for a lively two-minute motivational presentation that “influences action.” It involved a simple equation: Evidence + Action + Benefit = Desirable Actions and Results. We were advised to “sprinkle in a little thing that we call magic.” One person gave a two-minute speech on the importance of smiling.

“What do you do?” Andre asked the woman. He looked slightly stumped, considering the idea that anyone in the room would have a job that did not require persuading other people to work harder.

“I’m a dentist.”

In that moment, it struck me that, if soft skills do exist, they may come into play most urgently when you’re drilling a hole into a child’s tooth—more so than when you’re managing subordinates. As the population ages, mass quantities of skills will indeed be needed—most of all by people getting paid below minimum wage to empty bedpans, make small talk with the ailing, and manage their pain. So maybe there is a crisis in the supply of soft skills. It’s just not where we think it is.