Soft Skills - Ask a Wharton MBA
Develop Soft Skills – Work Smart & Live More
As I look back on my career, I have noticed a pattern to my success — every time I achieved something, three components were in play: Mindset, Action, and erseverance – more easily remembered as a M.A.P..
In this article, I’m going to explain what each part involves, along with some examples of each. I hope this framework and my stories below can support you in your career success journey. ...
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: ...
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. ...
It may sound counter-intuitive for me to recommend that you shouldn’t care too much at work. However, after reading this story, hopefully you can understand and appreciate why you should not care too much, if you want to accelerate your career success.
On Monday, I had a morning phone meeting with one of the data team leaders who was doing some reporting for our enterprise level initiative. I was not looking forward to it, as the lead person is one of those less-than-competent folks I mentioned in my recent article, How to Deal with Others’ Incompetence.
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If you want to advance in your career, advancement to people management is an important milestone to achieve. It takes 5-10 years to get promoted to manager. That’s like the initial climb into a Roller Coaster ride. The top looks wonderful and it’s thrilling to keep climbing up and up the team member ladder until eventually you reach the day where you are promoted. ...
My team recently submitted a proposal of which I prepared more than 75%. In fact, of the 25% my analyst (who is junior to me) prepared, I had to revise significantly. The final paper was jointly signed by both of us. Our Chief Risk Officer reached out to my analyst commending his great paper, cc:ing my boss. My boss then congratulated the analyst on his great work as well. ...
I had an important meeting to lead yesterday. After six months of managing this project, I was hoping this meeting would be the final one needed to get there necessary agreement from all the key business stakeholders. Everything was looking good — we already went through 4 rounds of feedback, and addressed all the concerns voiced over emails or on previous calls. Some of the key stakeholders that I thought would have serious objections were now big supporters of our reject output. This last meeting was just going to be a formality to put the bow on the final product. ...