There’s a new heavyweight title in town. Sometimes called “soft skills,” the more muscular term now favored in business circles is “power skills.” That’s because these interpersonal capabilities greatly strengthen people’s work performance, helping them to collaborate more effectively and manage complex conditions.
Consequently, power skills are vital to professional success; they’re not just nice-to-have extras. Critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and creativity fall in this skill category, and anyone who hones these abilities will scale the career ladder more confidently and quickly.
Universities have long been incubators of power skills. But graduates need to continue to polish these traits to be successful and often don’t get the support they need to master them on the job. Other workforce members perfected technical skills in vocational schools or real-life experiences that put them on their professional paths. But power-skill development is often overlooked in their training.
This lapse is unfortunate because power skills benefit organizations as much as those working there. Still, many employers don’t recognize their organization’s role in helping people build these crucial qualities, so they don’t have a method to teach them. Companies often offer learning opportunities, but they’re usually only geared to helping people increase their “hard skills” or technical abilities.
While it’s helpful for employees to broaden their expertise in concrete areas, it’s not a perfect science because these competencies must constantly be updated as technology or market conditions evolve. In addition, many jobs dependent on specific hard skills are being usurped by machines or AI.
On the other hand, power skills have an undiminishing impact. They don’t change or become obsolete, and technology can’t replace them. So with the proper guidance, people can continuously sharpen these crucial capabilities.
Research conducted by Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation, and Stanford Research Center concluded that 85 percent of job success comes from having well‐developed power skills. Now, forward-thinking business leaders are grasping their impact and finding ways to help employees acquire these success boosters.
A wide variety of power skills with different degrees of nuance improve performance and outcomes. Some are more relevant to specific industries than others. But experts agree that a core group of these skills will help people succeed in any career. For example, CoachHub provides the following list of the ten most impactful power skills across all industries.
A company’s culture is determined by the prevailing behaviors demonstrated by those who work there. So leaders who want to cultivate a supportive, high-performing culture consciously encourage the behaviors that will bring out the best in their staff.
And since power skills are essentially behavioral skills, the most effective way for business leaders to help employees strengthen them is to infuse them into their organizational culture.
Once they identify the behaviors or power skills they want their staff to develop, leaders should cultivate an environment where these traits are regularly coached, practiced, and discussed. They should become part of the organization’s vocabulary and be encouraged as individual and team goals.
Employers who build up their team’s power skills will reap big dividends. As the author of an article for Alliance Career Training Solutions notes:
“Power skills are the game-changing, X-factor-like skills and qualities that can take an employee, a team, a department, or an entire company from ‘sufficient’ or ‘good’ to ‘superb’ and ‘excellent.’”
Once power skills are rooted in their company, leaders will find they are the most reliable predictors for success, growth, longevity, retention, workplace happiness, and positive organizational outcomes.
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