What can soft skills do for us? They help us to build relationships and improve our reputation in the office and they open opportunities for our advancement indirectly.
Soft skills are characteristics that affect how well you can collaborate or communicate with others. These abilities assist us in building relationships with others, establishing reliability and trust, and directing teams.
A lack of soft skills might restrict your potential or possibly lead to your company’s failure. With the help of these 5 soft skills, you can manage projects more effectively, produce outcomes that satisfy and even impact your personal life by developing your interpersonal skills. Making, these five soft skills vital in growing a successful career.
5 Soft Skills You Will Need To Grow & Be Successful In Your Career
1. Delegation
As you move up in the organization, you cannot remain doing everything you did in the previous role. You can’t continue to take on everything, even though you’re used to being a doer. Your job is no longer to do but to ensure the work is being done in alignment with the company goals and in a strategic manner. You can improve your delegation skills by:
- Ensuring you are doing the things that only you can do.
- Understanding your team’s strengths.
When you know what your team is good at and what they enjoy doing and what’s actually in alignment with their future career goals, then you can give them opportunities to take on work that’ll be meaningful to them.
So take the time to ensure that you have standard operating procedures for the task that you’re passing on. If it’s up to you to be there for the success to really, truly happen, it’s gonna be hard to pass on a task like that. think about what makes you successful, what steps you take, and how can you best train someone.
Then have time set aside to train the new person, allowing them to come to you and ask questions over time. It’s important that you still remain the responsible party until they’ve demonstrated that they are capable of doing the new task. This will make others more willing to step up in the future to take on tasks and will inevitably make your job of delegation easier.
2. Leadership Skills
Leadership skills are important no matter what level of organization you’re at. When you are a good leader, you will naturally embody good teamwork skills because the heart of a leader is to serve others.
When we’re operating from a service or leadership perspective, we’ll naturally focus on the bigger picture of the company, aligning the company vision to the projects and goals you take on.
When you learn leadership skills, you will have greater influence, and when you influence people positively, they’re going to like you more.
One of the keys to being a great leader is to take responsibility for your actions and for your team’s actions. It’s important that you don’t place blame on others, especially when you’re at fault. Owning these things will allow others to remain in a place of trust with you where they want to be led, and they will be willing to listen to your guidance.
As a leader, we can sometimes think we can’t ever fail, and that we should always have all of the answers, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Great leaders know that failure is a part of success. Many leaders have failed time and time again before they ever got to success, but what they don’t do is own the failures as their identity.
Just because you fail, it doesn’t make you a failure. [QUOTE]
3. Adaptability Skills
If we are going to be adaptable, then we need to ensure that we are always growing and developing because this will allow us to develop our critical thinking skills, which will make it easier for us to be earlier doctors of change.
People who are flexible see change as a positive part of solving company challenges. Oftentimes, organizations will run into challenges and things won’t go as planned. You’ll have to People are flexible. They see change as a positive part of solving company challenges. Oftentimes, organizations will run into challenges and things won’t go as planned. You’ll have to change courses. The more flexible you are, the more others will want to follow your lead When others follow you, upper management will take note and see you as the leader that you are.
4. Problem-Solving Skills
People that continue to advance and lead in their organizations learn how to find and solve challenges, and they do this without being critical. We want to ensure that we are not critical whenever we’re finding problems or we will not be seen as a problem solver but more of a complainer.
If we become critical when finding those problems, then we will start to identify problems with people. Most often people are not the problem. Often it’s something in the system that’s broken or proper training might not be in place, or perhaps resources are needed. Work with your team to come up with a solution.
The first step to solving problems is taking responsibility without waiting or being asked and believing that you are capable of finding a solution even if you don’t know what it currently is.
As a leader, we can sometimes want to have all of the best ideas and solutions, but the best leaders don’t try to be the hero. Another person on your team may be the person that has the best solution be open to listening to others and hearing what their ideas are to solve the problem.
Not only will this increase the ideas in the solutions pool, but you’ll also get more information on why the problem may exist, and if others’ ideas are adopted, they will be bought in. Making it a win for the team member, the company, and you as the person noticing the problem.
5. Communication Skills
The most critical skill is great communication skills.
Most people who advance without having the skills to back it up do so because they are charismatic speakers. Most often, when we think of communication, we think of verbal or written communication, and when we think of these things, we just wanna make sure that we are communicating clearly.
Most people haven’t developed self-awareness around communication. They don’t fully grasp how their body language, their tone, and their words affect other people. What we see and what we know is that those that can communicate with clarity, competence, and warmth are the ones that people love, follow and believe.
You may be one of the best employees your company has right now, but if you were never able to communicate your value and your ideas in a meaningful way to leadership, then you will never be seen in the role that you are more than capable of already.
Your verbal skills are only a part of what you want to work on to improve your communication skills. You also want to work on your body language. If you are all balled up as if you’re in a small space, you can come across as less confident.
Learning communication skills is one of the best things you can do because when you know how to communicate with your words, your tone, and your body language, then you can be a very effective communicator.
Not only because you’ll be communicating more effectively and efficiently, but you’ll actually be able to understand how others are receiving the communication.
There it is—the five soft skills you will need to grow and be successful in your career. These five skills will set you apart from other colleagues and show your manager that you are ready and able to take on promotion and raise.
You can check out the full YouTube video on this topic as well as my other videos about career advancement for professional women.
And if you’re interested in diving deeper into what it takes to receive your next promotion, take a look at my proven 6-week course, My Promotion Plan, where we develop a customized path for your career advancement.
