Interpersonal Skills for future leaders

In today's rapidly changing economic environment, the need for adopting skills and building competencies are crucial for people who aspires to become future leaders.

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One of the key important skills-set is the interpersonal skills. What are the interpersonal skills? They are essentially your ability and competence in building relationships with the people around you. relationships which are effective, constructive and rewarding. And you won’t want to take interpersonal skills for granted. You need to be intentional about building them, but also in in highlighting those which are most important to employers and making the case for your strong interpersonal abilities.

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If you’re planning on becoming a future leader and seeking moving upward to higher positions in your organization or joining new organization, then this is the best time to differentiate yourself based on your ability to create, build and sustain solid relationships with teammates, colleagues and leaders.

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Young professionals often view their career development too narrowly. We tend to spend a considerable amount of time creating plans that focus on improving our technical skills early on in our careers while neglecting the more strategic interpersonal skills that make big career moves possible. Why?

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Often, our goals require mastering technical skills that are needed to perform our job duties effectively, like expanding our knowledge of new tools or becoming proficient in new programs.

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We see the development plans as recipes for success, and for a short period of time, they are. While technical skills may help us achieve our first promotions, they won’t help us as much three or four years down the line. As we advance to more senior roles, a greater emphasis and value is placed on interpersonal skills — skills that shape how we work on our own and with others. And those skills take much more time to develop. The earlier you begin to hone them, the better.

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Here are some of the interpersonal skills that you, as a professional, should invest in earlier in your career to help you reach your long-term goals faster.

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Cultivate followership on day one.

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A leader is someone who has the vision to set clear ambitious goals and builds advocacy while attracting followers who support those goals. Leaders exist at all levels of an organization and often get to where they are by gaining the confidence of their superiors and peers. Remember that every leader was once a follower.

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To be an effective leader, you must first understand how to be effective in that follower role. One way to do this is to manage up, down, and sideways. To achieve any long-term goal, you will ultimately need your superiors to advocate for you, and your peers to validate your ideas, and those more junior to you to help you execute. Here’s how to get there:

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·????? Manage Up: Know your manager’s goals and respect their time.

o?? During one-on-one and team meetings, make sure you have a clear understanding of your manager’s and team’s short and long-term goals. You need this information to understand how your daily tasks and projects fit into the big picture. If you and your manager are aligned, you’re more likely to reach your goals faster.

o?? Respect their time and be an efficient problem solver. Any time you approach your manager with an idea, make sure that you understand the strategic issues they’re facing. Ask yourself: What obstacles are stopping them from reaching their long-term goals? What can I do in my role to help them overcome these challenges? This will help you position your ideas as solutions to their problems and brainstorm measurable outcome. Your solutions don’t have to be “right,” but having a clear and evidence-backed perspective will demonstrate your problem-solving abilities. You want to show your boss that you’re a dependable and decisive thought partner.

o?? From your first engagement with your manager, try to establish a two ways clear communications that’s built on understanding his key challenges and goals. Then focus your engagement with your manager on either removing obstacals or achieving strategic results.

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·????? Manage Sideways: Forge strong ties with peers to build momentum.

o?? Aim to foster strong bonds with your colleagues and build an environment where you can share feedback. If you want to implement a new process or idea, for example, get feedback from your peers before presenting it to your boss. This will allow you to gain valuable insights, course correct, and create a more realistic plan of action. Knowledge sharing also has the potential to energize and inspire both you and your teammates. The goal is to develop yourself as a good collaborator and critical thinker.

o?? Always focus on positive engagement with your colleaguues by creating strong alignement, showing support and accepting their feedback and constructive critisizem. Try your best to become an affective team player.

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·????? Manage Down: Mentor and teach

o?? Whenever you can, invest in educating junior members on your team. Mentoring is?a great way to hone your leadership skills, as it helps you become a more active listener, broadens your perspective, and sharpens your storytelling abilities. Additionally, you can gain support from people who understand how you think and who can help you execute on projects more efficiently and effectively.

o?? Mentoring and coaching your team members is the best thing you can do to gain trust and boost your team performance. Always provide guidance and lead by example.

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Strengthen your emotional intelligence (EI).

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EI is our ability to understand, manage, and use our emotions in ways that help us relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. It’s comprised of four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

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Young professionals can work on building their EI by leveraging personal assessment tools, like The HOGAN assessment, Thomas assessment and others. These tools can help you understand your strengths, growth areas, and biases, as well as how they might differ from others.

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Just as importantly, many research-backed personality tests can teach you about common personalities in the workplace, revealing the key strengths and weaknesses, working habits, and communication styles of your colleagues. Exploring common personality types, and how they behave in the office, will make you more agile in social situations, and help you build positive working relationships with people at all levels of your organization.

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This can be helpful when you find yourself having to influence with little to no authority — something that happens often as a professional. In the future, for instance, you may need to convince a group of stakeholders — each with a different personality — that your ideas is a good one. By studying the strengths and weaknesses of common personality types, you can modify your delivery and communication style to maximize your influence. For example, if you’re presenting to someone who is highly extroverted, and tends to dominate conversations, you can begin by telling them you will outline your idea first, and take questions after. Or if you’re faced with someone who is a visual learner, you can present your ideas using data charts or infographics to help them easily digest your points.

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Master visual storytelling.

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Visual storytelling is the ability to tell a story through a combination of text, images, symbols, infographics, or diagrams. It allows you to visually lead your audience through a calculated sequence of facts, making it easier for them to think the way you want them to.

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Research has found that more than 65% of the general population are visual learners, meaning they need to see information to retain it. Studies have also shown that people retain 80% of what they see compared to 20% of what they read and 10% of what they hear. This means that the ability to effectively visualize your idea and present it in a way that is compelling to your audience can help you gain a lot of influence within your organization.

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There are multiple ways for professionals to deepen this skill: Exploring data visualization courses (i.e. Microsoft or LinkedIn), or intently learning how to use data visualization tools/products (such as Tableau) to explain why and how evidence supports your ideas or arguments.

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The best way to sharpen this skill is by studying different companies’ corporate presentations. These can often be found on the company websites under their “investor relations” tab if they are a publicly traded company. They’re often crafted by C-suite professionals or communication experts. Agnostic of industry or sector, these types of presentations provide meaningful information in a concise manner, are visually engaging to help breakdown complex concepts, and told in a specific order to shape a narrative that elicits the emotions they want their audience to feel. They can give you examples of how to organize and visualize ideas in ways you might not have thought of.

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A great source for visual presentations is the industries reports built by consultancy firms, usually consultancy firms issue periodic or annual reports covering state of certain industry or profession. These reports typically reflect different insights on the topic and reflecting it on diagrams and infographics which makes it much easier for readers to go through and remember.

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You can go through companies websites like PwC, KPMG, McKinsey, Deloitte, EY, BCG and other big consultancy firms.

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Interpersonal skills in alignment with Vision 2030

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Under the guidance of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, we embarked on a journey towards a brighter future with the launch of Vision 2030. Conceived by His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, this roadmap leverages our God-given strengths, including our strategic location, investment power, and centrality in the Arab and Islamic worlds. Our leadership is fully committed to realizing our ambitions and maximizing our potential.

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Since the launch of Vision 2030, we have laid a solid foundation for success by implementing unprecedented reforms in the public sector, the economy, and society as a whole. Despite challenges, we have gained invaluable experiences and strengthened our resolve to reach our goals. Our efforts have led to improved government efficiency, new growth and investment opportunities, greater global engagement, and enhanced quality of life for our citizens. These achievements belong to all the people of our great nation.

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Vision 2030 contains 11 vision realization programs (VRP’s) that drives hundreds of different initiatives driving the country towards achieving the ambitious vision, one of the main programs is the Human Capability Development Program.

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The Human Capability Development Program is the only program that is being led by His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia. Human Capability Development Program focuses on the development of basic and future skills, instilling values and developing knowledge to meet the requirements of the future local and global labour markets. To reach there we will need to focus on developing the interpersonal skills of the workforce in Saudi Arabia by adopting different initiatives that deliver upskilling and re-skilling for the citizens.

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Some of the initiatives under Vision 2030 with relevancy to interpersonal skills:

·????? Review and update primary to secondary curriculum framework to give more focus to basic skills and build skills for the future

·????? School leadership development and training

·????? Provide career guidance for students

·????? Skills accelerator

·????? New government employee onboarding program

·????? National skills framework and skill recognition system

·????? Intergenerational mentorship programs

·????? Market-driven training vouchers for individuals

·????? One-stop-shop career management guidance

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After understanding the importance of developing your interpersonal skills, and how it’s key factor of future job markets and focus of the vision 2030. You must ask yourself how can I develop my interpersonal skills ?

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Well, there’s many ways to develop your interpersonal skills through different sources such as:

·????? Training courses.

·????? Mentoring and Coaching.

·????? Workplace & on-job-training.

·????? Books and articles.

·????? Seminars and Workshops.

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The time is now to find a great role, and skills in creating, building and sustaining great relationships—interpersonal skills—will make you invaluable to hiring managers. Focus on the interpersonal skills which include self-awareness, communication, collaboration, conflict management, leadership and attitude. As we can see from the above, building an interpersonal skill is required to get ahead in the job market and become a valued asset in your organization.

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Professionals often miss out on investing in strategic interpersonal skills in lieu of learning technical skills that are more easily tied to near-term growth. But as you climb the corporate ladder, you’ll notice that it takes more than just technical skills to advance. Start developing your interpersonal skills early, and you’ll get a head start on securing future promotions that may just make your career.

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