Soft Skills - Ask a Wharton MBA
Develop Soft Skills – Work Smart & Live More
We have been talking a lot about the different soft skills we need to accelerate our career success, including self-management skills, which are needed to build inner excellence (like patience, persistence, confidence), and people skills (like communication skills, managing people skills, etc.). Well, one thing is common between all of these topics: in order to master any of these skills, we need to make changes in our behaviors at work. ...
How to stand up for yourself is an important topic for us to discuss if you want to succeed like an executive. As we discussed before, success is about working smarter not harder. You have to subtly self promote to build your reputation.
As part of self promotion, it’s critical that you stand up for yourself when others are talking about your work in a way that can negatively affect your reputation. For example, not everyone plays fair office politics: a person may falsely accuse you of some wrong, or take credit for your work. It is also possible that a misunderstanding or miscommunication resulted in someone pointing fingers at you. It’s unfair, but this is the reality of the corporate world. ...
Albert Einstein once said,
“Three rules of work:
My husband shared this quote with me this morning. While it seems so simple, there is so much wisdom in it. Here is what each rule means to me:
Rule #1: Out of clutter find simplicity
This quote reminds me of my volunteer experience with Dr. Pete at his Zone Healing Center. I have volunteered there for 4 years now as his office manager, working only 1-2 hour per week. ...
I work on multiple initiatives simultaneously at my current job. Some of them are long term, big projects, and some of them are smaller projects under one big program. Two of these smaller projects have given me serious headaches and stress in the past few days.
Why? Because the key people I work with on these two projects: ...
Whether you are searching for a job or working in a job, at some point you will need to ask for help if you don’t want to hinder your progress. No man or woman should be an island in their life or work. It’s unrealistic to expect yourself to know it all or do it alone.
This is why the ability to ask for help is one of the most critical soft skills to develop in order to achieve excellence in your career. Tom Peters, the author of the famous management book, “In Search of Excellence,” agrees. Assuming that you also agree, let’s talk about how to best ask for help, since the approach matters. Here are 7 tips on how to ask for help effectively: ...
What is all this talk about Monkeys you may ask? Well, the article is inspired by one of the most famous management articles written in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) back in 1974 called Management Time – Who’s Got the Monkey?
I think this is a must read for anyone who wants to succeed in their career no matter what your level is today. I actually only read this article 5 years ago and found the examples and advice still very relevant today. In this week’s article, we will talk about tips for managers – why you should leave the Monkeys to your team and focus your time more on Gorillas. Monkeys and Gorillas are basically animated analogies to represent small and large business problems your company is facing. ...
I turned 40 this year. I don’t know about you, but in my 20s, I always thought that 40 year olds were very responsible people. I also thought that 40 year olds seemed to know what they were doing — they seemed to have life more figured out. They were usually married, with a house, career, and 2.2 kids. At that time, I may not have wished to be old, but I wished I and life more figured out. ...