Back in the dark ages of the workplace, all those decades ago, there was a definite assumption that there were some male jobs and some female ones. Not so much an assumption as something regarded as unassailable fact. As with so many comfortable facts of previous ages this has turned out to be falsified by later events.

That we all now know of perfectly (even superlatively) competent female solicitors or male nurses means that such assumptions have to be set aside: there's also the research of those like Simon Baron-Cohen (no, not that one, Ali G's cousin) at Cambridge University. This shows that there are indeed what we might think to be 'male' attributes, like systemizing and 'female' ones like empathy, but these are not distributed according to the possession of that Y or X chromosome, rather more randomly across all people than that.

Yet the most important thing about people skills is that we now have a much less hierarchical workplace and method of management now. In fact, we've had to create this as a result of basic economic pressures. Think back a few decades and the standard workplace was many people doing very similar things under the direction of a series of managers. It didn't really matter what the industry was, car manufacturing, building, insurance clerks: many being directed by the few, with few skill of job differences between those many.

Look at the more common workplace now. Yes, of course there is a lot of jargon out there about the multi-disciplinary demands of this job or that but the important thing is that people are now really working in teams, teams where each is bringing a very different skill to make up the whole. This is an entirely different management task: instead of providing orders to the underlings (to overplay the phrasing) we are now needing to find the right skills to make the team work, provide the resources to allow them to work, make sure that team gels and then, the most difficult task of all, get out of the way of the experts in their own fields.

There's a lot of consultants playing on this (courses in 'emotional intelligence' anyone?) but the basic thought needs to sink in. The job of a manager has changed a lot. Instead of providing orders it is to provide direction: a direction, not detailed and prescriptive ones.

This is something that recruiters like Talisman are tasked to find these days: their clients, the companies, know that team working does indeed require people skills, the ability to manage people who are highly competent in their own areas: to make those experts see the greater picture, the whole that the team should be working towards. It really isn't just for the sales people any more: if it even ever was just for them.