 Do you think you’re qualified for the “Next Level” because you have certain special skills? Do you expect to be promoted to a particular job, selected to lead a team, or feel entitled to a position because you have extensive experience or highly developed aptitudes? While certain professional skills are certainly crucial to success, there is an even greater demand for “soft skills”—something more commonly known as “people skills.”
People skills are certain social competencies that allow one to work well with others. It’s what we call a “good personality” or “being a team player” and refers to how well you can interact with the people around you. In today’s competitive professional world, people skills have become a high value commodity. Ask any successful manager what he or she looks for when building a strong team and you will hear the same response: We need a team with strong people skills. In fact, when some leaders are given the choice between a savvy, highly-skilled prospect or a candidate with excellent people skills and less technical ability, they will typically choose the one who can work well with others and bring good chemistry to the team. Skills can be taught, but having good personality and temperament are harder to learn if one lacks them naturally. This is not to suggest that professional skills are not valuable—they are. But what good are professional skills if your attitude is toxic and breeds divisiveness among the people with whom you work? This is why a recent survey conducted by CareerBuilder.com revealed that 77 percent of employers were seeking candidates with highly developed soft skills. Another 16 percent of those surveyed considered the abilities employees have to interact well with other others to be more important than technical skills. Another study done by The Multi-Generational Job Search Study by Millennial Branding indicated that communication skills and the ability to work on a team are the more highly desired qualities in potential job candidates. Clearly, in today’s workforce, technical skills are merely the baseline. What propels people to the next level is their people skills. Over the next few weeks, I will be posting a series of blogs that will identify effective people skills and explain how they can be developed in our lives. For more information, check out my latest book, UPWARD: Taking Your Life to the Next Level now available on Amazon. Comments are closed.
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It was concerning King Saul that David said, “How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished.” His was a life that began with great promise and celebration, but ended in miserable failure and humiliation. His life is an example of how the mightiest of leaders fail.
Why do great men and women fall? How do leaders, quick to ascend with such promise of unparalleled success, find themselves awash in disastrous failure and disgrace? More importantly, can the path toward one’s downfall be discerned before it’s too late and be avoided? It is the premise of my newest book, How The Mighty Have Fallen that such a decline can be detected and reversed. The life and leadership career of King Saul, Israel's first king, provides us with a treasury of examples of "what not to do." The below blog post is the first in series of excerpts from the book to examine and avoid Saul's mistakes and find a successful path through leadership. READ AN EXCERPT |
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