Soft Skills - Ask a Wharton MBA
Develop Soft Skills – Work Smart & Live More
During this month’s mental fitness connect, “Ashley” brought up an interesting scenario to get the group’s input. She has been at her new job for five months now. Last week, her manager approached her and asked what she wants to do next in her career. Ashley was both baffled and suspicious. ...
I was initially surprised when Raina (not her real name) asked this question – how to obtain meaningful feedback from my manager. As we had 10 minutes left in our coaching call, Raina shared her situation and her question. She acknowledged that her manager was quite busy. However she still wished that her manager would give her more concrete feedback in her performance reviews so she knows how to improve. ...
Unfortunately most of us spend at least 50-75% of our life working for incompetent leaders! Why? Four reasons:
There are 3 common traits of incompetent leaders. Your leader could have one of these traits or worse all three.
Trait 1: Absentee leader – this leader “lets” the team do all the work and doesn’t really set strategy, lead, or coach others. Their style is often to outsource any or all efforts that a leader usually need to do to one of his or her team members. ...
There are so many perks when working from home including saving commute time and the ability to work in sweat pants. However working remotely makes it a lot more challenging to build relationships, including the one you need to build with your manager. Whether you always worked remotely or just started due to COVID 19 crisis, you should know how to best build your reputation with your manager remotely. ...
This is such a common issue as well as a highly stressful one. I am so glad one of the members asked me to talk about it in our January group coaching call. Here is her question
“We are asked to be financially savvy and not outsource any activity during Q1. We still have smart goals to achieve and I am understaffed. I am already running a lean organization. To continue to deliver results with all activities done in-house I need to overload the team. What should I do? Should I do the right thing and continue to explain the need for outsourcing activities or do the right thing for my career?” ...
It’s self-evaluation time. Are you ready to put your best foot forward? This is your chance to put the best representation of your work on permanent record and build your brand.
Many people are too humble or too general in their self evaluation. Don’t fall in that trap. Being too humble will work against you. It’s important to take full advantage of the annual performance review and invest time in writing a good self-evaluation.
This does not mean you should lie about your performance. What it means instead is you should:
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Mastering soft skills is critical to your career advancement. Louis Johnston, one of our executive authors, agrees. He shared in this interview how mastering certain soft skills helped him skyrocket his career and quadruple his compensation.
Louis started as an Online Marketing Associate, 10 years ago. He has since been promoted to Manager, Director, Senior Director, and now Head of Growth. This may sound like a straight-forward success story. It is not. He didn’t just happen to become super successful by working hard or hitting all his marketing numbers. On the contrary, he was hitting his numbers, but not getting much credit for it. Louis was stuck at the same level for awhile.
It was only when Louis decided to take massive action to develop key soft skills and do the opposite of what he usually did that led to his success today. This was not easy or comfortable for Louis but necessary to put his career on a faster trajectory.
I want to share Louis’ story because I also want to inspire you to take massive action.
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