The 7 Skills You Need to Develop for Business Success

The world of business continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, with half of all S&P 500 companies expected to be replaced within the next decade.

The first place that organizations need to adapt if they want to survive lies in the area of evolving workplace skills and up-skilling their workforce, according to HR People + Strategy. Clearly, those talents which bring enterprises success in tomorrow’s working world will be greatly different than those that have served them in the past.

Here are seven new skills that every business (and every legal department) should be adding to its employee learning and development plan if it wants to succeed in an age of constant change. And, for that matter, the benefits of up-skilling employees in this manner, as well as why it pays to be making this retraining a priority.

1. Creativity.  Trade secret: “Innovation” is just another word for improvisation. Likewise, it’s often a matter of perspective, as simple shifts in business or communication strategy can prove to be every bit as powerful at driving positive results for your organization as a game-changing breakthrough would be.

Don’t have the time or resources to think three to five years into the future or to invest heavily in giving your business plan a huge overhaul? No worries: You can succeed by up-skilling the workforce and teaching employees to think differently here and now instead. Train them to ask themselves questions like: What other possible uses exist for our products and services? How can we repackage or represent existing solutions to better appeal to new audiences? Are there ways we could be doing in a single step what’s currently taking us several? You may be surprised at just how quickly simple exercises such as these can send profits soaring.

2. Communication.  Wondering how to most effectively up-skill team members? Take a tip from the founders of Google, who once created a scientific method to analyze nearly every HR- and job-related decision that the company had made in order to see what made its top-performing employees so successful. Surprisingly, what they discovered was that technical skills such as an individual’s ability to manipulate software and create cutting-edge applications weren’t what gave these executives an edge. Rather, the soft skills, such as the ability to effectively communicate with coworkers and to empathize with others, that were likelier to determine who would be an effective leader.

Especially worth noting if you’re an employer: STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) capabilities ranked among the least important determinants of success amongst top employees. High emotional intelligence (EQ) proved a better predictor of superior on-the-job performance.

Thus, training workers to be strong communicators is every bit as crucial to finding success in tomorrow’s working world as is training them in today’s cutting-edge software engineering techniques or management theories.

3. Multitasking.  According to researchers at IBM, constant change is the new normal in the workplace, and unpredictability is the only thing we can predict. Noting this, workers will only be further stretched in the coming years between more and more tasks and projects, with their attention spread increasingly thin.

As a result, teaching employees how to effectively juggle a multitude of responsibilities and deadlines will become an important facet of employee learning and development plans going forward.

Given that staff will continue to be pulled in multiple directions in coming years, and with greater frequency, companies must train associates to effectively manage multiple tasks and to perform work efficiently. Likewise, managers will need to teach them how to better relieve stress, and the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

4. Agility.  Numerous businesses can now go from conceptualizing to executing upon a new idea in under 90 days, a process that may take less than 30 days for some startups. That’s because these organizations understand that the more quickly they can deploy a new idea, the faster they can get feedback from the marketplace—and the more rapidly they can use those insights to enhance their business strategy.

That’s why it’s vital to also teach employees the importance of adopting a minimum viable product (MVP) mind-set, wherein they use the least time and resources possible to create and test working prototypes. The faster the organization can bring concepts to life (and determine how audiences react to them in real-world environments), and the more rapidly they translate these learnings into action, the more successful they will be.

5. Listening.  Executives who want to rapidly create positive change in their organization and consistently find ways to stay ahead of the curve should train their team to grow bigger ears.

Studies have repeatedly shown that customers are the single best source of successful and innovative new ideas, and everyday employees (i.e., those closest to the customers) are often the most informed audience in any business. Unfortunately, nearly half of all businesses aren’t even surveying or polling clients, let alone collecting actionable information from customer service reps, salespeople, and other front-line leaders.

Bearing this in mind, treasury and finance leaders should teach their people to keep their antennae tuned for incoming signals from the marketplace. The better staff become at hearing them, the better off the business will be.

6. Empathy.  Of course, it’s also important to train workers to be more empathetic if you want them to stay better attuned to any operating environment and to respond rapidly and productively to changes within it. That’s because doing so frequently requires us to relate to the needs of customers and coworkers; engage with these individuals; and find ways to inspire them to take positive action at every turn.

Similarly, strong emotional intelligence is key to leading people and helping guide them past setbacks, as well as through times of great uncertainty and upheaval. So, managers who want workers to be successful leaders should teach them to be more empathetic. Doing so will make them more open-minded, flexible, and resilient in the end.

7. Leadership.  In a world of new and novel problems, it pays to teach staff to be capable of applying both logic and creativity to solving any given challenge. What’s more, in increasingly uncertain business environments, it’s also vital to train them to make firm decisions in the absence of perfect information. This can be done by introducing them to the concept of strong, but weakly-held opinions—wherein they do their homework and make the best choice given current insights but remain open to revising plans as more information is gained.

It’s also important to underscore the importance of keeping a cool head under duress and acting thoughtfully, even amidst ongoing disruption. While leaders can’t predict every twist or turn the marketplace will take, they always have the ability to pivot action plans to better steer organizations towards success. They also have the ability to course-correct and revise those plans further as scenarios continue to develop.

Hailed as the world’s leading business strategist, award-winning expert witness, strategic consultant, and professional speaker Scott Steinberg is among today’s best-known trends experts and futurists, and is the bestselling author of Think Like a Futurist; Make Change Work for You: 10 Ways to Future-Proof Yourself, Fearlessly Innovate, and Succeed Despite Uncertainty; and Fast >> Forward: How to Turbo-Charge Business, Sales, and Career Growth. The president and CEO of BIZDEV: The International Association for Business Development and Strategic Partnerships™, Steinberg runs the website www.FuturistsSpeakers.com.

From: Corporate Counsel