The Hard Truth About Soft Skills

What's the hard truth? Soft skills get little respect but will make or break your career. Master your soft skills and really get ahead at work! Fortune 500 coach Peggy Klaus encounters individuals every day who excel at their jobs but aren't getting where they want to go. It's rarely a shortfall in technical expertise that limits their careers, but rather a shortcoming in their social, communication, and self-management behaviors. In The Hard Truth About Soft Skills Klaus delivers practical tools and techniques for mastering soft skills across the career spectrum. She shows how to: manage your workload handle the critics develop and promote your personal brand navigate office politics lead the troops and much more! Klaus reveals why soft skills are often ignored, while bringing their importance to life in her trademark style—straightforward, humorous, and motivating. Perfect for readers at all professional stages—from those who are just starting out to seasoned executives—this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to take his or her career to the next level.

Harness the power of emotions - so you can leverage differences, build engaged teams, and create healthier organizations Whether you work group stretches from here to Dubai or can easily meet in a conference room down the hall, anger and frustration are easy to come by when others don't do things your way, follow directions, or respond the way you think they should. But when emotions manage workplace relationships, the result is conflict, disengagement, and low morale. Emotional Intelligence for Managing Results in a Diverse World delivers a novel prescription for managing effectively in today's workplace: Use the dynamic principles of EQ plus insights from the author's pioneering diversity work to increase your competence in managing emotions and enhance your effectiveness in work, relationships, and life. The book also gives you the know-how to use this approach in coaching and developing others to help them be more successful on the job.

It is well-documented that working hard isn't enough to keep your professional star rising: Self-promotion is recognized as one of the most important attributes for getting ahead.

Despite its name, soft skills are increasingly becoming the hard skills of today's professional world. It is not enough to be highly trained in technical skills without understanding and developing the softer, interpersonal, and relationship-building skills that are critical for professional growth. While technical, "harder" skills may present opportunities for you, it is your soft skills that will maintain those opportunities and provide avenues for new opportunities to present themselves. Your ability to identify and master these soft skills, ranging from critical thinking, dressing for success, networking and personal branding, are critical for achieving professional success. While these soft skills are often undervalued and/or not presented sufficiently to young professionals and pre-professionals, you will learn in this book that...Soft skills are anything but soft!

***BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS 2021 WINNER: SELF DEVELOPMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR*** Everyone says a great leader needs EQ, Emotional Intelligence, soft skills, blah, blah, blah. What does that even mean? Where do you start? Where’s the line for that on the P&L? You might think that business is all about facts and figures. You probably prefer it that way. The truth is that as uncertainty and business complexity increases, successful leaders need to embrace soft skills to get the best out of their people in a sustainable manner. In this succinct, no-nonsense approach, Anne Taylor shares: Key soft skills relevant for leadership and practical applications of how to use them every day drawn from real-life case studies Straightforward tools to better understand yourself, because your leadership starts with YOU Simple frameworks to communicate with others to get things done while building a stronger relationship with them (at the same time, how efficient!) Logical ideas you can try immediately with on-line support if you want it. All done in an easy to read, logical, organized manner for people who prefer facts and don’t consider themselves natural ‘people people.’In a direct yet professional manner, Anne combines the results-oriented focus from her extensive business background in Fortune 100 corporations with her passion for personal awareness and conscious choice to help you get better results through your people, fast. The Practical Principles in this book, when applied, practiced and honed, can improve your effectiveness, impact and bottom-line results.

Journalism is a pool staffed by distracted lifeguards and no matter how fancy your school is, your first week in a real newsroom will feel like a shove in the small of the back into 15 feet of water. Most of us come up for air eventually, but if you’re like journalist and educator Colleen Steffen, you may still be left feeling like all that training in inverted pyramids and question lists left something important out: you! Journalism is people managing, wrestling truth and story out of the messy, confusing raw material that is a human being, and the messiest human involved can often be the reporter themselves. So it’s time to talk about it. Instead of nervously skirting the sizable EQ (emotional intelligence) portion of this IQ (intelligence intelligence) enterprise, Soft Skills for the New Journalist explores how it FEELS to do this strange, hard, amazing job—and how to use those feelings to better your work and yourself.

Solve the number one problem with today's young workforce—the soft skills gap The number one challenge with today's young talent is a problem hiding in plain sight: the ever-widening soft skills gap. Today's new, young workforce has so much to offer—new technical skills, new ideas, new perspective, new energy. Yet too many of them are held back because of their weak soft skills. Soft skills may be harder to define and measure than hard skills, but they are just as critical. People get hired because of their hard skills but get fired because of their soft skills. Setting a good example or simply telling young workers they need to improve isn't enough, nor is scolding them or pointing out their failings in an annual review. However you can teach the missing basics to today's young talent. Based on more than twenty years of research, Bruce Tulgan, renowned expert on the millennial workforce, offers concrete solutions to help managers teach the missing basics of professionalism, critical thinking, and followership—complete with ninety-two step-by-step lesson plans designed to be highly flexible and easy to use. Tulgan's research and proven approach has show that the key to teaching young people the missing soft skills lies in breaking down critical soft skills into their component parts, concentrating on one small component at a time, with the help of a teaching-style manager. Almost all of the exercises can be done in less than an hour within a team meeting or an extended one-on-one. The exercises are easily modified and customized and can be used as take-home exercises for any individual or group, to guide one-on-one discussions with direct-reports and in the classroom as written exercises or group discussions. Managers—and their young employees—will find themselves returning to their favorite exercises over and over again. One exercise at a time, managers will build up the most important soft skills of their new, young talent. These critical soft skills can make the difference between mediocre and good, between good and great, between great and one of a kind.

If you are ready to propel your career to the next level, if you are striving for both a successful career and a fulfilling life, Skills That Build provides the missing credential in your healthy success tool kit. Skills That Build is the intersection of science, business, and well-being, from the perspective of a seasoned management consultant and executive coach with an academic background in cognitive psychology. It offers readers an accessible means to coach themselves on skills in four critical areas, which promote psychological health and generate success both in the workplace and at home.​ Demand for leadership coaching has skyrocketed worldwide in the last five years, but few people can afford a professional coach. Even fewer receive coaching for career development and personal growth through their employer. Busy racking up buzzworthy credentials on their own time, today's emerging workers and mid-career professionals teeter precariously between personal and career aspirations. ​​ If ever there was a need for preventive mental health practices and accessible tools for workplace empowerment, the time is now. Just over a year ago, the workforce was focused on ascending the career ladder, with less attention paid to maintaining a healthy grip on personal well-being. Since then, the pandemic has underscored the need for resilience and effective ways to cope on both professional and personal fronts. While successful leaders build success from within, they must first lead themselves. This book becomes the virtual coach on the bookshelf, as readers learn and master career-advancing skills that promote psychological health and well-being. Anyone can learn these behaviors and enhance their current repertoire using this evidence-based guide for skills that build us.​ Through stories from coaching clients, groundbreaking scientific research, examples of business applications, and exercises to hone and master new behaviors, Skills That Build demonstrates actionable techniques and empowers readers to jump-start their uniquely personal strategies for growth.​ ​