From Soft Skills to Power Skills: What Happened at ING Hubs
First slide of the evening at ING Hubs Romania and it’s a Hofstede Cultural Dimensions chart comparing Germany, Romania, the UK, and the US. If you haven’t come across Hofstede before, the idea is simple: every country has measurable cultural traits that shape how people work together. How comfortable are they with hierarchy? How much do they value individual achievement over group harmony? How do they handle uncertainty?
Romania scores 90 on Power Distance (we’re very comfortable with hierarchy) and 90 on Uncertainty Avoidance (we really don’t like surprises). Meanwhile, we score just 20 on Indulgence, which roughly means we lean toward duty over enjoyment. Compare that to the US with 40 on Power Distance and 68 on Indulgence, and you start to see why Romanian teams and American clients sometimes feel like they’re speaking different languages even when the English is perfect.
The reason this chart matters: Germany, the UK, and the US are the countries that bring IT business to Romania. They decide if we’re good executors or if we’re more than that. And these cultural gaps are exactly where “soft skills” stop being soft and start being the difference between a delivery team and a strategic partner.
The event
Upskilling the Romanian IT Industry was a working session on March 19, 2026, at ING Hubs Romania in Bucharest. The premise: transforming soft skills into “power skills” through practical application. A panel discussion on professional capabilities in today’s AI-driven landscape, followed by interactive workshops and networking. Speakers: Anne Dumitrache (Trainer, Coach and Organizational Psychologist), Alin Pandichi (IT Area Lead at ING Hubs Romania), Silvana Helal (Digital Transformation Leader at Human Leap), and Răzvan Căciulă (VP of Engineering at Showpad). The kind of event where you actually talk to people face to face, which apparently still matters.
Burnout vs. smart work
One of the tracks tackled something I see everywhere: the swing from overwork culture to the disengaged 9-to-5 mentality. Two extremes, neither productive. Add the AI revolution creating constant pressure for continuous learning, and you get a recipe for burnout, stress, and loss of intrinsic motivation.
The learning goal was straightforward: sustainable high performance. Build resilience. Shift from external motivation (bonuses, promotions, fear) to intrinsic motivation (purpose, mastery, autonomy). Simple to say. Brutally hard to do. But at least naming it correctly is a start.
Self-leadership without the title
The second track that caught my attention was about self-leadership and strategic vision. The key issues were painfully familiar: over-reliance on managers, lack of proactive ownership, fear of stepping forward without formal authority. This is the Romanian IT industry in a nutshell. We wait for someone to tell us what to do, then complain that nobody listens to our ideas.
The goal was to understand self-leadership as an individual contributor. Practice initiative, accountability, and influence without needing a title on your business card. I liked the framing. You don’t need to be a manager to lead. You just need to stop waiting for permission.
The hero self and the traumatized self
There was a flipchart with a Venn diagram showing True Self, Traumatized Self, and Hero overlapping. The discussion around it was fascinating. The “hero self” for Romanians means not trusting authority. Which, given our history, makes perfect sense. But if we wear this mask too long, it becomes our identity.
And then someone dropped the most Romanian insight of the evening: “The most damaging thing for Romanians: what will people say?” I felt that one in my bones. We optimize for perception instead of progress. We avoid risk not because the risk is real, but because someone might judge us for trying. It’s a cultural trap that keeps smart people playing small.
VUCA is dead, welcome to BANI
Apparently we’ve graduated from VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) to BANI: Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible. The key shift is the “non-linear” part. You can’t establish cause and effect anymore. Something happens in one corner of the world and your sprint planning falls apart for reasons nobody could have predicted.
I don’t love acronyms, but BANI at least feels honest. “Anxious” is a better description of the current moment than “uncertain.” Uncertainty implies you might figure it out. Anxiety implies you know you won’t.
Resilience is entrepreneurship in disguise
One definition of resilience stuck with me: “Resilience means that you will invest effort in something that might not happen.” That’s not just resilience. That’s entrepreneurship. That’s every side project, every product bet, every decision to learn something new when you have no guarantee it’ll pay off.
The adjacent topic was self-regulation. How do I regulate my emotions in this crazy world? No easy answers were offered, which I appreciated. Anyone who gives you a three-step framework for emotional regulation in 2026 is selling something.
Executive presence in one sentence
Someone defined executive presence as “reading a room.” That’s it. Not the power suit, not the deep voice, not the MBA vocabulary. Reading a room. Knowing when to speak, when to listen, when to push, when to back off. I’ve seen junior developers with better executive presence than C-suite executives. It’s a skill, not a rank.
The panel: patience, critical thinking, and ethics
During the panel discussion, we tackled the question: “Technical expertise is no longer enough on its own. Which soft skills are becoming critical for people in technical roles today?”
My answer was patience. I know it sounds boring. But patience is what lets you sit with ambiguity instead of rushing to the wrong solution. Patience is what lets you listen to a user’s actual problem instead of jumping to the feature you already wanted to build. Patience is the skill that makes all other skills work.
Alin’s answer was sharper: problem framing and critical thinking, especially the ability to filter the flood of AI-generated information. He also said something I wrote down immediately: “Soft skills are like muscle. They grow when you’re using them.” Not when you read about them. Not when you attend a workshop. When you actually practice them in the messy, uncomfortable, real world.
Răzvan brought up the ethical aspects of technology, which was a welcome addition. We spend so much time talking about what AI can do that we forget to ask what it should do.
The harder questions
The panel also wrestled with: “How can we assess and track the development of these skills? Do you believe frameworks such as OKRs, KPIs, or other evaluation methods can meaningfully capture progress in communication, collaboration, or emotional intelligence?”
And: “Where do you think people and organizations currently stand compared to the level that will be required?”
I don’t think we landed on clean answers. Which is the point. If measuring soft skills were easy, we’d have solved it decades ago. The fact that we’re calling them “power skills” now is at least an acknowledgment that they’re not secondary to technical skills. They’re what makes technical skills useful.
What I’m taking home
The Hofstede chart at the beginning set the tone perfectly. Romania’s IT industry exists in a web of cultural expectations set by Germany, the UK, and the US. We can either keep being “good executors” who deliver what they’re told, or we can develop the power skills that let us shape what gets built, not just how it gets built.
Resilience, self-leadership, executive presence, emotional regulation, patience. None of these show up on a Jira board. All of them determine whether your Jira board matters.
Good event. Good people. Good conversations that didn’t end when the panel ended. That’s the part you can’t replicate on Zoom.