So You Want To Be A Leader

What are the most essential skills required to succeed in the workplace today? Experts call them 21st Century Skills -   skills that are essential for the nation’s progress in the 21st century. They are not academic skills but rather the skills that will be needed to succeed in the global economy. They include Learning Skills, the likes of critical thinking and communication, Technological Skills – which prepare us for the digitalization era, and People Skills which are essential for connecting and collaborating with others.

In a June 2014 article titled 21st - Century Talent Spotting in Harvard Business Review, renowned author and hiring expert, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz says that when organizations conduct inquiries into the skills that make certain employees turn into stars, they generally find that emotional intelligence-based competencies matter more than those based on technical and reasoning skills.

Having a high IQ and technical competencies are basic requirements. Selected talents have to be qualified with the right “smarts” to land a certain position. But to excel in that position, they need more than that. 

When the global hiring expert and his team did a study of C-level leaders who had succeeded and those who had failed, he found the same pattern in America, Germany, and Japan.  Those who failed were hired on the basis of their drive, IQ, and business expertise – but fired for the lack of people skills. He concluded that for leadership roles, emotional intelligence is far more important than IQ.

Spiced up with today’s VUCA environment, the military-acronym-turned-corporate-buzzword, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, current leaders need spades of IQ & EQ and the ability to be agile and adapt to the dynamic shifts happening globally. It is not enough that they have the right skills now; we need talents who have the potential to learn new ones on their feet, running.

When I share this at a recent workshop for young leaders, some of the participants wryly commented, “Thanks for the revelation, but how do we prepare with skills for what we don’t know would be needed?” I told them I don’t know the answer, but forums like this provide a platform for connecting and listening and getting an insight into other people’s experiences which might prove useful someday. Through learning and sharing from workshop facilitators and podium experts as well as from fellow participants and peers, the learning growth would be exponential. And they have to take that ownership to foster valuable relationships, seek further opportunities to expose themselves and learn and network and create communities of learners and experts. Continue to collaborate and build upon ideas and expand on them and question and view problems creatively and find solutions beyond the norms…

That’s about all I can say, I told them. The ball is in your court, what you do with it, will determine the outcome of your game. I leave them with an Arab Proverb,   “If the wind blows, ride it.”

Reading Materials:

21st-Century Talent Spotting by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz : HBR 2014

A Comprehensive Guide to 21st Century Skill by Jenna Buckle

https://www.panoramaed.com/blog/comprehensive-guide-21st-century-skills