Soft Skills - Ask a Wharton MBA
Develop Soft Skills – Work Smart & Live More
The following is a step by step instruction on how to develop an effective, practical presentation. This process keeps in mind your audience and builds informal buy-in prior to the presentation.
Effective presentations are the bread and butter of consultants as we are paid handsomely by major corporations sometimes just for recommendations delivered in a presentation format. I wrote these step by step instructions for my own use while working in consulting and wanted to share them with you. They are based on my experiences at McKinsey and Deloitte and were used by myself and other managers/senior managers at Deloitte to build effective presentations. ...
Negative feedback is a fact of life. Sometimes it’s fair, constructive, and expected, but sometimes it can be completely out of the blue. You cannot easily change your boss’s perceptions or motives for giving you negative feedback. What you can control, however, is how you respond to it. So learn how to handle negative feedback early in your career. ...
Communication skills are some of the most critical soft skills for achieving career success during a job search or in the workplace. Improving your communication skills is a huge task, since business communication encompasses verbal and written exchanges, formal and informal styles of communication, along with one-on-one discussions and group talks. Obviously, then, this article is just a starting point. ...
In a separate article, I talked about a famous Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, “Who’s Got the Monkey?”, and why an effective manager must let his team take care of the “Monkeys” (problems discovered during their work). Today, I want to shift focus and talk about tips for the team members — How can you excel as an individual contributor and demonstrate that you are ready for a management position? ...
How to give constructive feedback is a great question to ask and an important soft skill to develop especially if you are now managing a team. The abiliity for coach and mentor well each of your team members is essentially to your and your team’s success. To be a great team leader, you need to be able to provide constructive feedback that meets two objectives ...
Previously, we discussed the first part of this real life situation that Jessica is experiencing. Today, we will finish this topic on how to break into a managerial role with a follow up discussion I had with Jessica a few weeks later. Here is her follow up email updating me on her situation and some new challenges she is facing. ...
In my article, “Dealing with Difficult Personalities – What Not to Do,” I talked about 4 things not to do:
Continuing with my example with Anna, what should I have done? To recap: Anna hada great reputation for being smart and excellent at her job. I also met her casually in the hallway, and thought she was quite nice. During our first business meeting, she cut me off and began to pepper me with questions about why I needed this data and what I planned to use it for. Her tone was sharp and aggressive. I was quite surprised and caught off guard. ” Here are 5 tips I recommend using to deal with any “difficult personality” at work, and for achieving the best long-term results. ...