Digital Companies Need More Liberal Arts Majors

Creativity, Empathy, Listening and Vision: Soon, companies will rush to hire the skills of liberal arts students in the same way that they compete for coders and engineers today. Certain skills will be even more in demand in the leaders of the future.

In today’s digitally driven world, companies are competing ferociously for technological skills. They believe the ability to create the hard code that makes a product come to life is at the heart of their success. Without code, after all, you merely have ideas on a napkin or a dream in your head.

It’s the same with data analysts and business intelligence engineers. What’s more important than taking the massive amounts of data that a company receives every day and making sense of it? Decoding this data, everyone tells us, will help companies pinpoint exactly what each consumer wants.

The current emphasis on these skills is entirely rational, as no company can ever hope to be successful without them. But what companies forget is that this won’t be true forever. In fact, it won’t be long before these very skills become commoditized. In the future, computers will take over more and more of these tasks, including programming and data crunching. The things that are foundational to a company’s success today will be replaced and automated by a machine tomorrow.

But there will be a limit to how far computers can replace human capabilities, at least in the near long term. What can’t be replaced is precisely what seems overlooked today: liberal arts skills, such as creativity, empathy, vision and the ability to listen. These skills will hold the keys to a company’s future success. And yet firms aren’t hiring for them. This is a problem for today’s digital companies, and it’s only going to get worse.

For example, launching a product with a mediocre user inter- face or unintuitive user experience is currently OK, if not encouraged as best practice. It’s part of the old Silicon Valley mantra: Launch a product that barely works and iterate, iterate, iterate. But as more companies move to the digital space, they’re discovering that “launch and beg for patience” doesn’t hold true anymore.

As consumers begin to lead digital lives, companies must meet them where they are, regardless of their tech savvy. Companies with easy-to-use interfaces and intuitive functionality will win every time over companies that create roadblocks to using their products.

That’s where liberal arts skills come in — and where liberal arts students will finally have their day in the sun. Soon, companies will rush to hire these skills in the same way that they compete for coders and engineers today. And, perhaps not surprisingly, certain skills will be even more in demand in the leaders of the future:

Creativity: Every company will need to figure out how to get consumers to use their products. What does the consumer want? How can we make this product intuitive for him? Creative thinkers will help companies create an easy-to-use, unintimidating product that everyone can access. Simplicity is hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it. But only people with specialized creative skills — honed from years of thinking, reading and writing — have the talent to make the complex simple and the difficult accessible.

Leaders will need to create the type of culture in which creatives thrive. Employees will value cultures that are supportive, fluid, open and dynamic, and these are the very same traits that a leader

Qwill need to demonstrate in order to create and maintain such a culture. Culture creation, then, will be a prized competency of future business leaders.

Empathy: For companies to truly understand the needs of their customers, they must be able to think and feel like them. And for a business to be successful, knowing how its customers think and feel is everything. You can’t outsource that to a computer. You need to hire for it.

Empathy is just as important a skill, if not more so, for business leaders to have. Once a company has outsourced most of its basic tasks to computers and 3-D printers, knowledge workers and creatives will represent the bulk of the organization. And these same employees will have higher support requirements from their leaders than they do today.

QListening: If empathy is the core of creativity, then listening is the heart of empathy. And that is exactly what liberal arts majors have been prepared to do. It’s through listening that you make sense of the world. Knowledge workers who are able to truly hear and understand what is being said — and what isn’t — will have a powerful impact on their organizations. By listening deeply, employees build substantive relationships with each other, as well as with customers.

Equally, leaders will have to stop talking so much and start listening more — much more. Their smart employees have a lot to say, and speaking down to them won’t be acceptable. These workers expect to be treated as equals, so leaders must be comfortable with disclosing more information. Using stilted company jargon or being opaque in communications is a surefire way to lose the respect of your most valuable employees. A leader has to have the capability not only to listen hard but also to demonstrate through their actions that they can turn what they’ve heard into action.

QVision: Companies in the future will need all their employees, not just their leaders, to be visionaries. Employees will need to be able

Qto take in massive amounts of information in a world that’s changing ever faster and then make sense of it all in a way that a computer can’t. A computer can factor in objective data, but a worker must take that data and then overlay it with subjective understanding that can’t be quantified. The ability to understand the world through different lenses and turn competing or disparate viewpoints into a compelling narrative is an art, not a science. It requires an intuitive understanding of the world that comes from a deep immersion in the liberal arts.

Companies today should begin preparing themselves to be the powerhouses of tomorrow by bringing in more employees with liberal arts skills. Rather than scorning philosophy or history majors who have spent years wrestling with knotty theoretical issues and explicating them in precise detail, firms should understand that the skills these students possess will help them become the leaders and CEOs of tomorrow. Begin building a culture that tells your most critical future employees, “Your creativity, empathy, listening skills and vision can thrive here. We’re open for business, and you’ll be the main driver of our success.”

TOM PERRAULT is the chief people officer of Rally Health. © 2016 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp., distributed by the New York Times Syndicate.

The things that are foundational to a company’s success today will be replaced and automated by a machine tomorrow.