Soft Skills - Ask a Wharton MBA
Develop Soft Skills – Work Smart & Live More
You do NOT need to know Powerpoint well to give great presentations. Many people spend too much time making good looking slides and miss out on the larger picture. There are three things that would make a presentation great.
Notice, I never mentioned that your audience is impressed by your slides. The whole point of a great presentation is for the audience to listen and then take actions that you hope they would take. I learned how to give great presentations at McKinsey. When I first joined McKinsey out of college, I would see my manager spend a day or two writing a draft storyline for a client presentation. The storyline is written in Microsoft Word and would only be 1 -2 pages long. I thought how strange – how can something so short take so long. The team would be working on individual slides for weeks, but the manager focuses mainly on this storyline. I used to think my manager was just slacking off until I tried to write one myself on my 4th project. I couldn’t do it well even after 3 days. ...
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. ...