We’ve all heard about soft and hard skills. Many of our academic experiences tend to be focussed on those ‘hard skills’ which are easiest to measure. Most courses now also look at some of the more esoteric attributes needed in a modern member of the workforce.

Think back to your group work and projects which seemed to make up so much of most university scores. You’ll see your early experiences of working as a team member, where varied communication techniques and prioritisation skills were needed.

However, there were (and still are) a heap of skills which nobody tells you about. These can often seem like people have a gift for them, and so if you don’t have that, you aren’t able to do them. This is not true in my experience.

Those that are the best at these skills, make it look like they’re not even trying. Whilst some people might have a built in proclivity towards them, all of them will have practiced to improve them and you can do the same.

Successful leaders create solutions that sit across large parts of their organisations and are bought into by lots of different types of people. They get you excited about the way forward and are usually talked about as ‘visionary’.

These folks do not just get up in the morning and start having exciting visions. They spend as much of their day as possible, trying to find out about other peoples’ worlds.

They visit them, they talk to them and truly engage with people — actively listening to what they have to say, rather than just waiting for their turn to speak.

You need to look to find out about things which on the surface may have nothing to do with your job. Explore options which at first seem like a dead end. Find out about a world which you have never engaged with and can’t see yourself doing so in the future.

The perspectives which these activities bring, will be the foundation on which you can build links no one else has seen, visions that excite people and innovative solutions that set you apart.

I define empathy as imagining how someone else will feel given a particular situation. For me, sympathy is the actual feeling of these emotions. As such, empathy is a professional skill that can be developed, whereas sympathy is not. NB There are lots of other ways of looking at this — but for now, this is what I’m working with.

When you’re looking to drive a solution in your organisation, the first question you should ask yourself is ‘how will this make people feel’? Implementing new technologies or processes would be relatively simple if it weren’t for all the people involved. But we know that people don’t act rationally when it comes to change (I certainly don’t).

If we are going to be able to anticipate and use these reactions to help drive projects rather than stall them, we need to imagine what the person over the table is experiencing. Then we should engage them on terms that consider this experience and aim to address it.

Everybody knows the person in the organisation that seems to get more things approved than anyone else. It’s often seen as ‘being the bosses’ favourite’ and sometimes this is true. There are people who just get an easier ride than others because of factors that they have no control over (age, sex, race, education, existing friendships etc etc).

However, there are just as many people who work really hard at creating the environment for their perspective to be the one that is taken forward. Here are a few things you can do right away:

Build Relationships — don’t just focus on understanding your team and the people near to you. Whilst this is clearly important, it’s just as likely that you’ll end up needing someone’s help or decision from another team, directorate or even organisation. So take them for coffee, be curious about their world and go from there…

Network Mapping — it’s well worth spending time looking at the people in your organisation and working out who they listen to. Whether that’s others in the organisation or external voices, work out how you might be able to influence these conversations. This is a great thing to do at the start of any project.

Present information in the way that people like it — you may need information to be detailed and filled with historical data in order to make a decision. Others would rather be told a story and given an exciting vision of the future to buy into. Some need to see what their competitors are doing and some want to feel that they’re breaking new ground that nobody’s thought of. Spend time understanding these differences and work out how best to present the information you have to those that matter.

Give people easy decisions to make — rather than making an individual feel like they’re signing off a year’s worth of risk, help them by giving them the smallest decision to get things going. This is one of the reasons that iterative projects are so appealing to leaders — they can find out more information and test things and may never need to make a ‘big bang’ decision again!

“Good critical thinking includes recognising good arguments even when we disagree with them, and poor arguments even when these support our own point of view.”
Cottrell, S. (2005) Critical Thinking Skills p47 New York, Palgrave & http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillshub/?id=277

If you’ve done a masters level qualification, you will recognise this kind of skill. Essentially, rather than just consuming information when it is presented to you, take an active approach in the evaluation of it.

Ask yourself what is the agenda of the person who’s created it and is that outcome aligned with your own. Be inquisitive about what sits behind the ideas you’re shown and analyse what you might not be seeing just as much as what you are.

By doing this, you can be a far more effective consumer of information. You will be able to use the perspective’s of others to support or challenge your own ways of thinking and make them better as a result.

You will also grow the respect of your peers, team and leaders if you can provide commentary and insight, rather than just copying and pasting links to content.

“Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction”
Francis Picabia

The difficulty with changing your mind, is that sometimes it’s the right thing to do and sometimes it’s the worst thing you can possibly do. I think most people spend a lot of their life trying to work out when to do which.

However in the work world, it’s particularly important to not close yourself off to the idea. When someone comes in with a new approach, even if it’s counter to your experience, perspective or intuition, don’t shut it out completely.

Take time to understand their perspective, why they think it’s a good idea and evaluate your own biases. Are they coming from an informed perspective or because that’s the way you’re used to operating?

“Darwin: ”It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able to adapt to and to adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds itself”
Charles Darwin

To truly change your mind, you need a huge amount of confidence, no small dose of humility and lots of practice. If you can gain a reputation as someone who will look at the merits of an argument, make a decision and give clear rationale — even if people don’t agree with you, they’re more likely to respect you.

I have found that Identify, Reflect and Discuss to be the best way for me to get better at almost everything I do. The aim for me is always to be more choiceful in the actions that I am taking. This means rather than being carried away by my instincts, I try to assess a situation. Identify the right choice based on the reality rather than my imagined shortcuts that your mind often gives you.

Identifying what skills you want to develop is the first stage. In order to do this you need to have a decent understanding of what you can already do, and where your gaps are. To find these you should speak to other people, do some research and perhaps try to find a mentor or coach to guide you.

Individual Reflection gives you the chance to look back at the actions you took and work out for yourself, if they were completely choiceful. Did you operate in the way you would like to or is there more you could do? This needs a decent level of emotional maturity and a high degree of honesty with yourself — it is not always a comfortable discussion!

Once you’ve looked at yourself, I find a Group Discussion with at least one other person gives me even more to work with. By getting another set of perspectives on my actions, I can discover things I would never see for myself. By setting these up regularly, you can also hold yourself and others to account by setting goals, which in turn make progress easier.