Tips to Improve Soft Skills For Career Growth

Soft skills are the interpersonal skills, that are required in all spheres of life, be it personal or professional.  Many studies have asserted that 75% of long term career success resulted from the soft skills that a person acquires in his professional career. His/her technical skills and knowledge plays only 25% role in professional excellence.  This concludes that how it is important to acquire, practice and implement soft skills in workplaces for better professional growth and success.

The 5 Best In-Demand Soft Skills for Professional Excellence are

a. Time Management

b. Adaptability Skill

c. Collaboration Skill

d. Persuasion Skill

e. Creativity

 There are plenty of resources and techniques available to help you in this endeavour. But we are presenting you with, some of the best and proven workable techniques, to master these set of soft skills:

 A. Improve your Time Management Skill

Time management is a struggle for many people. If you're a manager or leader of your team, time management becomes even more of a challenge. Stick to rules to given below to master this skill. 

1) Maintain a Diary-

Maintaining a time diary gives a good picture of how you typically spend your day.

Practise this for a few days and you will get to know where you waste your time or what jobs consume your most of the time.

This time inventory helps you to know the areas where you can cut your time spent and improve the time management schedule of the day.

 2) Make a Schedule as per Priority -

·        Organize your days and weeks, in advance!

·        On daily basis, make a list of tasks that you need to accomplish.

·        Prioritize your important tasks according to the importance or urgency of the work.

·        You should figure out the tasks/ activities that deliver the best returns than others.

·        Make a To-Do list and break down into discrete steps. If your next day is very busy and important, then get prepared for it one day ahead and keep yourself ready with everything that you need to carry.

·        Practising the prioritization of activities and sticking to the schedule to carry out the workload surely helps you to inculcate the Time management skill, quickly.

 3) Set Deadlines -

Always devote a few minutes before starting - in planning and organizing any project and then set a realistic deadline to a task.

Make sure that you give sufficient time to get the task accomplished efficiently. There is no point in setting deadlines if you always push them back.

Stick to your deadlines and make use of calendar and gadgets to effectively manage your time. If the task is challenging one, give some buffer time to accommodate some unexpected changes.

Delegating tasks to your juniors can also help you with achieving the goal easily and meeting the deadlines in time. 

 4) Stop Multitasking -

Multitasking hampers productivity.

Our brain works better when we focus and concentrate on one thing at a time. Finish the work in hand and then move on to the next.

Juggling few things at once should be avoided to improve time management skill.

Discard the unnecessary tasks/ distractions and focus on the important one.

By doing one work at a time, you increase productivity and quality of work, hence avoid multitasking.

 B) Develop Better Adaptability Skill

In today's fast-moving work environment, Adaptability is an important skill. Being adaptable and flexible means that you are not rigid, open to new changes and even work outside your comfort zone to meet the challenges. Here are some techniques share to develop the Adaptability skill:

 1) Observe changes around you -

Make a conscious effort to observe changes happening in your environment.

Monitor trends, values, consumer behaviour, etc. and compare the present observations with the past one.

Find out the changes taken place and why they are happening.

This awareness prepares you mentally to accept the changes positively and build a constructive plan to cope with it.

 2) Willingness to Learn -

If the observations demand you to learn new things, then you must not hesitate to do so. Unlearn the unfruitful things and learn the new in-demand technical/soft skills or knowledge with appropriate educational resources.

Take guidance from specialists of your trade or from the desired fields to adapt yourself to changing needs.

Always consider this as an opportunity to evolve you personally and professionally for the better.

 3) Leave Your Comfort Zone -

Change is difficult to accept for a normal human being and usually, we don’t want to leave our comfort zone so easily.

To enhance adaptability skill, you have to stretch yourself a little and test your potentials, limits and boundaries.

Consciously engage every day, in either small or big activity/task that lie outside of your comfort zone and try to manage or complete it. This is the zone where learn and growth happens, instinctively.

 4) Acknowledge the fact that changes are bound to occur -

Handling unexpected changes are always difficult, but changes are bound to occur.

Hence, acknowledge the change and it becomes easy to keep a pace with it.

Open your mind, learn to think big and expand your horizons.

This helps to resolve complexities of your thoughts and your mind starts to explore new activity/ venture, that gives positive results.

 C) Developing Collaborative Skill

It is the collaborative skill of the people that takes any organization or business to rise to success and sail through all difficult times, courageously. That is why employers always cherish such employees who have a great collaborative skill to build a great team. Here are some tips to develop Collaborative Skills:

 1) Build Trust Level -

Trust and respect start from yourself! If you give it, you will receive it.

This is the first step putting forward for collaboration in a team.

Don't take your teammate for granted even if you are friendly in relationship.

Maintain professionalism in your approach at the workplace and try to build trust and confidence among teammates.

You can simply start by being honest with your teammates, praising their work achievements, congratulating on project/task completion, help out juniors or colleagues with their work, etc. These are the small ways to build trust levels around yourself.

 

2) Foster Communication -

Communication is very important in developing collaborative skill.

You should share your vision, ideas, opinion, decisions, experience or expertise with other teammates to meet the goals.

Also, move from "I" and "You" to "We", while communicating with your teammates.

It creates a lot of difference. Because 'Self-branding' is always frowned upon in the teamwork.

  3) Encourage Innovations -

Encourage new ideas and innovations, be open to acknowledging the opinions of others without being judgemental.

Remember that obstacles and challenges can be overcome by building a positive frame of mind.

Participate in brainstorming sessions, ask your team member their thoughts, reasoning, ideas, etc. on a topic of discussion. This helps you to increase your know-how and you can take your project ahead further with new ideas, creatively.

It also creates a healthy collaborative environment at your workplace.

 D) Developing Persuasion Skill

 Being able to influence and persuade others to get them to do what you want them to do is a key skill, not only in business but in life as a whole.

Persuasion skill has become an increasingly vital managerial skill to achieve work goals and objectives to drive businesses forward in today's highly competitive work environment. Here are a few basic techniques suggested to learn this skill.

 1) Clear & Right Communication -

Communication plays an important role to persuade customers or clients to take a certain course of action.

Communication whether written or verbal, it should be clear, brief, relevant and correct to send a right message and to create a right impact on other people.

 2) Do Complete Research -

Do your complete research well in advance on the topic, product, project, etc. that you want to deal with.

This equips you with knowledge and positions yourself in a better way while persuading a person/client.

Right knowledge helps you to easily connect with the other person and also you’re able to counter with better answers to their doubts, queries, objections and arguments.

Try to make a connection with people by showing how you can solve their problems easily.

 3) Be Confident -

If you project arrogance or fear, persuasion will not succeed.

Instead, be confident, do each interaction with confidence and maintain a good body language. Don't try to impose your way of thinking or ideas on others to convince them.

Always be polite and confident while persuading as this will encourage people to feel confident in what you are proposing to. 

 E) Develop Creativity Skill:

Many people think creativity is a natural talent and you're born with it. But, this is not completely true, because anyone can learn to be creative. You just need to channelize your inner creative genius by following below given simple tips.

 1) Try to create something new every day - 

Make it a ritual to try out your hand in creativity every single day, even if it's only for 10 or 15 mins.

Keep a handy diary or anything that can help you to put down your thoughts, ideas, plans, concepts or strategies, etc. on it.

It is not essential that your creativity niche is directly related to your professional niche. It can be different, but it’s positive impact can be seen in your professional work too. eg. if you're interested in writing articles, your professional/technical writing skill will also improve.

So, give some time to your creativity daily to get it polished every day.

 2) Build a Network -

To be creative you need inspiring people into your social circle.

Interacting, reading, listening to their views and seeing your issues in different angles may help you to reconstruct your new ideas.

Your perspective to problems and solutions may change and can help you get closer to more perfection and success in your niche.

So, stay connected!

 3) Believe in your capability -

Our brain is an amazing machine!

Our belief system impacts our capability to do and learn new things, more.

Believing in our creative capabilities allows our brain to work without any psychological barriers and generate new ideas. It just needs regular exercise to sharpen the skill.

 Practise the above set of tips to develop the professional soft skills for better career growth and excellence. For more professional skill enhancement you can reach us anytime.  

Regards

Prabha