Being good with people is a skill, not a personality

For small business owners who have said some version of “you either have it with people or you don't” about the first person they hired.

Hire for attitude, train for skill. It is good advice as far as it goes, and almost every owner I meet in Phoenix says a version of it. The trouble is what it implies: that the people part is fixed at the point of hire, and everything after that is scheduling.

If that is true, then your ceiling was set by whoever applied in March. I do not think it is true, and there is reasonable evidence that it is not.

What happened when a company trained it on purpose

Achyuta Adhvaryu, Namrata Kala and Anant Nyshadham studied a soft skills program run inside a large garment manufacturer, published as NBER Working Paper 24313 in 2018. Workers who went through it became measurably more communicative, picked up technical skills faster, and were 20 percent more productive than the control group afterward. The net return to the firm was 258 percent within eight months of the program finishing.

I want to be careful about the transfer here, because it matters. That was a garment factory in India, with a mostly female workforce and a program running over months. It is not a cafe in Laveen or a twelve-person clinic in Ahwatukee, and a study in one setting does not hand you a result in another. What it does establish, in a setting where output could be counted precisely, is that the people skills moved when they were trained, and that the movement was worth more than the training cost. That is the assumption “you either have it or you don't” rules out from the start.

Hiring for it is a weaker filter than you think

The other half of the strategy is the part nobody stress-tests. If you are relying on selection to get the people part right, how good is selection?

In 2022 Paul Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher Berry and Filip Lievens revisited the statistics behind decades of hiring research in the Journal of Applied Psychology. They found that a standard correction had been inflating how well selection methods predict job performance, and lowered mean validity estimates by roughly .10 to .20. Structured interviews still ranked at the top — and a structured interview is a good deal more rigorous than the conversation most small businesses run before a hire.

So the fair reading is not that hiring is useless. It is that hiring is your weaker lever and training is your stronger one, and most owners have it the other way around.

The market is pricing this, whatever we call it

America Succeeds analyzed more than 80 million job postings with Lightcast and found that seven of the ten most-requested skills were durable skills — communication, dependability, problem solving — rather than technical ones. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 39 percent of workers' current skill sets will be transformed or outdated between 2025 and 2030.

Employers are already asking for this in writing. Very few are teaching it.

What changes if you treat it as a skill

Calling it a personality trait leaves you with encouragement. Calling it a skill gives you four things you can schedule.

• You can name the behavior. Not “be better with difficult customers.” The first sentence out of your mouth when someone at the counter is frustrated, and what comes after it.
• You can model it. Someone competent does the thing in front of the team, including the version that goes badly.
• You can make people practice it out loud. This is the part everyone skips, and it is the part the research keeps finding decisive. I wrote about that in practice is the part people skip.
• You can follow up. Two weeks of small check-ins beats a strong day of content that nobody returns to. The evidence on that is in why the session is ninety minutes.

None of this requires you to become a trainer. It requires you to stop treating the people part as weather.

The part I will not overclaim

I am not going to tell you a workshop raises your revenue. Too much sits in between. What I will say is softer and better supported: teams that handle a frustrated customer well tend to keep more of them, and the people who feel competent at the hard conversations are less likely to quietly start looking. If you want the arithmetic on that second one for your own business, the calculator does it. What one lost employee or client costs you →

Common questions

Is being good with people a trait or a skill that can be taught?

The evidence points to skill. "We hire for attitude" hands the outcome to whoever a candidate happened to be before they walked in, when the four things that make someone good with people, a named behavior, a model, out-loud practice, and follow-up, can be taught and scheduled like any other skill.

Do employers value durable people skills over technical skills?

Yes, and it shows up in hiring data, not just in surveys. An analysis of more than 80 million job postings found seven of the ten most-requested skills were durable ones like communication and problem solving rather than technical skills.

What is the single biggest mistake in how businesses try to build this skill?

Skipping practice. Explaining the right way to handle a frustrated customer is comfortable for everyone in the room and does the least. Making people say the words out loud, badly at first, is the part that changes what they do on the floor.

Sources

• Adhvaryu, A., Kala, N., & Nyshadham, A. (2018). The skills to pay the bills: returns to on-the-job soft skills training. NBER Working Paper 24313. Working paper, not peer-reviewed at time of release.
• Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040–2068. Peer-reviewed.
• America Succeeds & Lightcast. The high demand for durable skills. Analysis of 80+ million job postings.
• World Economic Forum (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025. Employer survey.