Soft Is the New Strong

For a long time, “soft” was an insult. 

In the past, across boardrooms, side conversations and other professional experiences, the message was clear: To get ahead, you can’t be soft. Direct meant stern. Strength meant stoic. And anything that resembled empathy, listening or human connection was quietly dismissed as a weakness – or at least not something worth praising out loud. 

At Franco, we’ve always pushed back on this mindset and approach to leadership. And this International Women’s Day, we’re not just pushing back – we’re owning it. 

“Soft skills” like empathy, active listening, critical thinking and courage have long been attributed to women in the workplace. But rather than being recognized as strategic strengths, they’ve been minimized, labeled as “nice to haves” or left off evaluation criteria entirely.

Research backs this up: Emotional intelligence accounts for nearly 90% of what separates exceptional leaders from average ones. And with empathy in measurable decline across society, the leaders who possess these skills are more valuable than ever.

At Franco, we don’t just acknowledge this reality. We embody it every day, starting at the top. Our CEO Tina Kozak, COO and President Tina Benvenuti Sullivan and Chief Marketing Officer Nikki Little are three leaders who have each built their careers around a belief that these skills are everything, not extras.

Nikki has been saying this for years, and she’s done with the label entirely.

“Soft is the new strong” isn’t just a campaign slogan. It’s a business strategy.

Throughout her career as a leader and hiring manager, Tina Kozak has long argued that organizations prioritizing soft skills outperform on financial metrics, KPIs, retention and more. When it comes to hiring, soft skills aren’t just a bonus – they can be the deciding factor.

Tina Sullivan echoes the same philosophy, adding a perspective shaped by years in automotive – an industry that historically didn’t always make room for this kind of leadership.

That belief extends all the way into how we structure and evaluate our team. One of the most tangible expressions of this philosophy at Franco is our role definition process, a framework Tina Sullivan has championed that goes well beyond a traditional job description.

Rather than simply outlining responsibilities, our role definitions set personal objectives for each team member, create space to identify where they want to grow and stretch and inform how we conduct our bi-annual reviews. It’s the emotionally intelligent version of a performance process: one that asks not just what you’re doing, but who you’re becoming.

The connection to the bottom line is direct. When our people are clear on their purpose, supported in their development and operating in a culture where their whole selves are valued, the work gets better. Teams are more cohesive, client relationships are stronger and the agency is better positioned to grow. Soft skills don’t exist despite business performance – they drive it.

In 2017, our leadership team went back to the drawing board on defining our values. Not because the old ones were wrong, but because they weren’t connected to how we were showing up for our clients, community and colleagues each day.

What came out of that process wasn’t aspirational – it was descriptive. When leadership brought these values to the team, people immediately recognized themselves and each other in each of them. They could point to specific moments that matched exactly what was on the page.

One of the clearest expressions of our soft skill philosophy is how we operate internally: not in competition, but in complement. We believe that where individual strengths overlap is where the real spark ignites.

In practice, this means being as invested in a colleague’s strengths as your own. It’s a shift from comparison to celebration – and Tina Sullivan sees it as one of the most important cultural evolutions at Franco.

This belief system shapes how Franco builds client teams, ensuring every engagement reflects the full breadth of the agency’s strengths and perspectives, not just one point of view. When people feel safe to contribute differently, and celebrated for it rather than compared, the work that comes out the other side is better because of it.

Soft skills don’t look the same on everyone – and that’s exactly the point.

At Franco, we believe the mix of our team’s strengths is one of our greatest assets. Some of us lead with empathy. Some with persistence. Some with patience, curiosity, courage or the ability to listen in a way that makes people feel genuinely heard. There’s no single version of soft skill leadership and our team reflects that beautifully.

This International Women’s Day, the women of Franco are answering the question: What is your soft strength, and why? We invited each of them to name the skill that defines how they show up in the workplace and how it makes them better at what they do.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Franco (@franco_detroit)

Together, these voices tell the full story. Not just of a campaign, but of a culture that was deliberately built over years to make room for every kind of strength.

Every year our identity evolves. Today, we describe our culture as Head and Heart. It’s the intersection of strategic thinking and human connection. This is the direct expression of what our leaders have spent their careers proving: that data and empathy aren’t opposites. They go hand in hand.

And in a moment when artificial intelligence is reshaping how agencies work and compete, that intersection matters more than ever. AI can improve efficiency, sharpen creativity and expand what’s technically possible. What it cannot do is replicate the deeply human skills that define great client service – the ability to listen between the lines, to read a room, to build trust over time, to know when someone needs counsel and how to deliver it with care.

Nikki sees this as one of the defining professional challenges of our time and the clearest argument for why these skills can’t be deprioritized.

Think about every service interaction in your life: your doctor, a retail associate, even a contractor at your home. You want them to be competent, of course. But what you remember, what you tell people about, is almost always how they made you feel. Whether they listened. Whether they were kind. Whether they gave you what you actually needed, not just what you asked for.

Client relationships at an agency are no different. Anyone can write a press release. What keeps clients coming back and what builds the kind of partnerships that last is everything else. Curiosity, responsiveness and the sense that someone is genuinely invested in your success. Those are soft skills. And at Franco, they’re part of our DNA.

On International Women’s Day, we celebrate the women of Franco who show up in their unique ways every day and everyone we work with who embraces us. Our soft strengths aren’t soft at all. They’re the reason clients trust us, teams thrive and meaningful work gets done.

Soft is the new strong. It always has been. Join us in saying it out loud.