Building the Skill-Sets That Support Our Vision

What are the skills that support the changes in our structures and help us in shaping a new way of doing things? If we are to build a better and a more sustainable world together, we have to first build the skill-sets that will direct us towards the desired path and make sure we stay on it.

Why soft skills

At BB Consulting, we recognize the importance of soft skills that are, opposed to hard skills, independent of the industry we work in. They are actually valuable on both personal and professional level, since they also facilitate navigating the challenges in life and the complexity of our societies.

We could say they are skills of collaboration (working together) and hope (imagining a positive future).

As we can see from our partnership in the international StayOn project, focused on empowering disadvantaged youth in rural areas, they are fundamental for a young person in the beginning of their career. When they are entering the job market, they also need to prepare for potential changes in future market conditions. Along with the StayOn partnership vision, we aim to encourage, motivate & equip young people with soft and hard skills to achieve their professional goals. With trainings and coaching, the project helps the participants improve their existing skills, build new skills, and then supports them in implementing them. Soft skills that the project’s partners find vital for our youth today are just as crucial for anyone, active in the present uncertain times and especially in the future. Successful companies and organizations are looking for these skills in future employees and applying them in their current teams as they are more and more aware of their positive role.

Building the skills frameworks

When we think about how to thrive, one of the essential points to focus on is the question of skill-sets we need to acquire or enhance. Every step, every change, every goal we set for ourselves, our teams or our company, is accompanied by a necessary skill which will lead us there. That’s why, no matter which topic BB team focuses on, we always keep in mind the appropriate skill-set to build on. We have often emphasized imagination, system thinking, dialogue, collaboration and learning as indispensable skills in the new business realities, on the projects with our partners when building competence frameworks as well as in these newsletters.

It is not enough to establish organization’s mission and vision, we need to know which skills accompany it.

Moreover, not reflecting upon which skills we might require to face the future means risking our resilience, even in times of relative calm and even more so in crisis. Pondering on the future, we might also ask ourselves what differentiates us from AI. Instead of keeping up the humanly unreachable, let’s think about where our true value is. Humanity is in the interactions and their richness, in our capacity to imagine, feel empathy, come together and co-create. Interestingly, soft skills are increasingly higher on the agenda even in traditionally ‘IT-oriented’ professions.

These skills are actually vital for the organizational culture and architecture of any company. Acknowledging their place in its functioning means naming them, discussing their meaning and role, making space for them and their development as well as investing in their training. When we start developing competence frameworks with our clients, we always use co-creative approach which takes in consideration their individual culture code: the specifics of the company's culture, ambitions and language. We continuously focus on the same soft (managerial) competencies, but at the same time adapt them to the specific needs of the organization.

Every organization can and should adopt these skill models to its own industry and mission, its needs and goals, or the language the people involved are used to, if they are to be effective.

Let us know in the comments below which skills are the most important in your team!

How have the necessary leadership skills also changed, facing major social, environmental, economic and other challenges? We can ask ourselves not just how these changes have transformed what people, employees and teams expect from their leaders. We can also ask how a leader can best bring out and empower them in the skills, needed to face the challenges and even more so to thrive and create better. We can make space in leadership for qualities that have not always been synonyms with management, such as love, vulnerability, humbleness, compassion and authenticity. AEIOU (aroha-eb-ikigai-oikos-ubuntu) leadership for example uses five principles, grounded in love, interdependence, trust and community, as fundamentals for sustainable and conscious leadership of tomorrow.

Learning for life

Participating in developing any kind of new (random) skill also means keeping ourselves inspired and interested in things of life, which is even more important than directly boosting our professional CV. It opens us up to new experiences and perspectives, gives our brain an opportunity to refocus or make new connections, wakes up the creativity process, lifts our confidence with accomplishments, and possibly much more. After all, they are some of the ingredients of life’s joy, these feelings of discovery and wonder.

Nothing can prepare us better for the future than curiosity, being open and able to learn, reconsider the gained knowledge, then share and recreate it with others.

This is the most crucial skill for the future that can make us as ready as we can be for any other new skill we might have to adopt. It is also the skill with a potential to make society’s ties stronger as it celebrates our cooperation by not denying our diversity. It is only together we can find the path to a better world and stay on it, too.

"But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is only evidence of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change." - Rutger Bregman

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w / Ksenija Spiler Bozic, Andrej Bozic, Ursula Butkovic, Anja ?erc

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