These 5 soft skills will help enhance your career, whether you’re just starting out or if you’re looking for a change
These days, it’s not enough to be the brightest person at the table or in the interview. Employers are looking for a range of soft skills in candidates to show that you can work well in a team environment, win over clients, and initiate good ideas. Here are 5 soft skills that we believe everybody should be looking to hone to advance their career.
5 soft skills to help enhance your career
1. Creativity: how to generate original ideas and spark solutions
If you have an echo chamber of like-minded individuals, that will be the death of creativity and innovation.
At a base level, everyone possesses a foundation for creativity that needs to be encouraged and brought to the surface. So as a start, team members need to believe that they are idea generators and they have the ability to come up with creative ideas. If someone believes that they aren’t inherently creative, this is a self limiting belief and assumption that could be self sabotaging.
Developing a growth mindset which is a concept introduced by Dr. Carol Dweck is another key to unlocking more creativity. This is a concept of how a person thinks about their own abilities related to intelligence and learning. Having a growth mindset is a belief that you can improve through your own efforts. You accept challenges or setbacks as opportunities for learning and don’t shy away from them.
It is fair to say however, that just working on yourself is also often not enough. The environment in which you are, also plays a part as one of the most important things to facilitate experimentation. Encouraging people to see what may work and what may not creates an environment of psychological safety. One way to do this is for leaders to walk the talk and demonstrate out of the box thinking themselves. This, together with encouraging healthy conflict and debate, and empowerment to take risks could lead to all sorts of unexpected creative outputs.
2. Persuasion: convincing others to support your ideas, help to attract investors, sell campaigns, inspire teams or trigger movements
The ability to persuade, to change hearts and minds, is probably one of the greatest skills that can give you a competitive edge in a knowledge economy.
Brevity is crucial to making a persuasive argument or speech. An effective and persuasive argument should be made as compactly and in as few words as possible. The opening of a speech is also the most important and should lead with your strongest point.
Create scarcity. This is what creates value even if it is value creation of yourself.
Use the power of visualization and paint an image that matters. Paint an image of a future experience you can provide for your audience.
Learn to transfer positive energy. Positive energy is contagious, it can motivate and invigorate. Sometimes it's a straight forward as eye contact, confidence, excitement when speaking or just intent listening.
3. Collaboration: able to work in a team and unlock synergies towards a common goal or a collective good
Without effective collaboration, even a team filled with the most experienced and smart people will struggle.
Know your strengths and use them. If you know the value you bring to the team, play them up, let people know and get associated with having that competence and expertise.
You need to draw from a variety of behavioural styles, specialism and knowledge to build collaborative teams. This then helps minimize inefficiencies, helps you go wide with creative ideas but also quickly pull back in to focus, and build camaraderie in the process. So collaborative teams and leaders should be championed and celebrated as this is a skill that should be valued in today’s ever complex and busy world.
Rules of engagement. Often teams jump into the challenge and charge ahead. Spending a little time up front aligning team expectations and agreeing on ways of working goes a long way. When you set expectations, agree and align on ways of working, there is better efficiency and less friction and more energy put into what matters most.
4. Adaptability: thriving in change and uncertainty
We live in a time of rapid change, unpredictability, and instability.
Those that will thrive are quick to read and act on signals of change in context. They have worked out how to experiment quickly, frequently and economically with everything including products, services, business models, processes and strategies.
The ability to experiment in a cost efficient manner for example using technology like open source softwares, access to virtual tool boxes, using plug and play platforms, turning on and off with freelance expertise.
And even adaptability of self. Managing one’s emotions though constant change and unpredictability. This is one of the key traits of emotional intelligence.
5. Emotional intelligence: able to perceive and understand the emotions of yourself and others and learning how to modulate emotions and outcomes
We all have different personalities, different wants and needs and different ways of showing our emotions. Navigating through this takes tact and skill. Emotional intelligence is the ability to be self aware of your emotions, understand what they mean and recognize how they are affecting the people around you.
People with high emotional intelligence usually are people wanted on teams, are usually the ones who get help when they ask and are usually able to make others feel good. They usually are much more in flow than people who are easily angered or upset.
In his book titled Emotional Intelligence - Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist, developed a framework of 5 elements that define emotional intelligence:
i) Self-Awareness - people with high emotional intelligence are usually very self aware. They understand their emotions and don’t let them rule. They are willing to take an honest look at themselves and see their strengths and weaknesses and work to better themselves.
ii) Self- Regulation - this is the ability to control emotions and reactions. They don’t let their emotions go to an extreme which can sometimes lead to careless decisions and behaviours. They respond rather than react.
iii) Motivation - when you have a high level of emotional intelligence, you are usually motivated. They are productive, love a challenge and are effective.
iv) Empathy - this is the ability to identify with and understand wants, needs and points of view of those around you even when it’s not that obvious. They are usually good at listening, managing relationships and relating to other people around them.
v) Social Skills - stating the obvious, it’s usually easier to talk to and like people with good social skills. These people with this trait of high emotional intelligence are usually team players, they focus on helping others, they manage conflict and love building positive relationships.
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