May 5, 2020
012: Critical Soft Skills
Developing your soft skills will enhance and develop your career. In January 2020, LinkedIn published a list of five soft skills that companies are looking for right now. In this episode, I discuss the following critical soft skills: 1) Creativity, 2) Persuasion, 3) Collaboration, 4) Adaptability, and 5) Emotional Intelligence.
You can download the free Leadership Guide for Finance and Accounting Managers here. The original show notes are no longer available.
Please visit stephenmclain.com for more resources.
We are currently producing an online course to help you with your Finance and Accounting career.
Transcript
WEBVTT
00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:08.000
This week on the podcast, I'm discussing critical soft skills you need to develop for your career.
Soft skills can be the major factor for your success in the workplace or not how well can you get along with others in the office? How well can you adapt to change or communicate a new idea? I believe that when hiring, consider the candidate soft skills first, you can much more easily develop the technical skills later. Enjoy the episode today. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. I want to address a few issues that prevent us as leaders to move forward making our teams and our organizations better. We often are not properly prioritizing or synchronizing team tasks properly. I believe this to be a major leader task, we need to make sure that our team members are doing the tasks in the right order and the right priority that will make our team work better. And our organizations better. There are two leadership extremes that I really don't like. And I have addressed those in prior episodes. One is the micromanager and that's for obvious reasons. And then also the leader who puts everything on autopilot, the autopilot will say, I hold my team accountable. And that sounds good initially, but you can't find this type of leader until something goes wrong. And I believe you need to find a balance between later your team do the work, and also being present to guide the process and to eliminate any kind of conflict, and also to prioritize what the team is doing to ensure the team is doing the right tasks in the right order. And let's talk very briefly again about processes. Often our processes don't work. And that's why there's frustration, what we need to do is write down the processes we need to map them out. And then we need to create a way to continually review and improve these processes. And I'm challenging you all out there. All of you who are working in the finance and accounting teams to write down your processes, review them and find a way to make them better. And I would say you need to do that at least quarterly. This is episode number 12 of the podcast. And today we're going to talk about critical soft skills. Peggy Klaus, who has trained executives at top companies like Disney and Sony Pictures said soft skills get little respect, but they will make or break your career. I wanted to do an episode on the importance of soft skills, because these really determine how you interact with people interact within the structure of the organization. And I'm going to continually recommend that organizations consider a candidate soft skills first and the technical skills. Second, we tend to hire people on our accounting and finance teams that do an incredible job when it comes to managing a spreadsheet going into databases, pulling out the numbers and doing some really beautiful analysis. However, the same people who are so technically savvy with Excel, and with databases, and with putting together projections and knowing how to do monthly close and can do some analysis and know how to do journal entries. The same people can't interact with anybody. They can't work on a collaborative team, they can't give input, or they can't respect other people's opinions. They're very good at doing their job, but they're in front of their screens, and they're doing whatever task you've given to them. They're great. But in today's workplace, we really want people who are strong in the soft skills that we're going to talk about today. These same soft skills help you to interact with people and processes and process improvement and the organization as a whole. The same soft skills also highlight your character, your likeability and then your long term potential for advancement in your career. Back in January of this year, the LinkedIn blog published a list of top in demand soft skills. These skills are what companies are looking for right now. And the five soft skills that I want to highlight our creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. And I want to take you through all five of these and how I see them and how they apply to our finance and accounting teams. Now creativity is the first one
and that's about developing solutions to complex problems across the company. And I believe that it's about continuous improvement, and not following the status quo as finance and accounting professionals We sometimes have a hard time with change, or with coming up with something different. We like to stay in our every day list of tasks or everyday things that we need to get done. And we'd like to stay in that same process, what I want to challenge you to do, and as you grow this skill of creativity is to find a better and a simpler and more streamlined and even cost effective solution to whatever problems that we're facing, whatever, whatever area of our processes that need to be fixed, we want to find a more creative solution to it. And don't be afraid to bring up those solutions. And the other thing that I want to challenge leaders out there is that we need to protect the ability for our team members to bring us solutions, even unpopular solutions. Because if you don't do that, you're not going to get any input whatsoever. If someone's going to feel afraid, because of someone's reaction, or even team members reactions to bringing up a good idea that no one's going to bring up those good ideas. I've said this before in a few other episodes, and I continue to talk about this with everyone who have a chance to discuss leadership skills with is that as a leader, you just need to create a great environment and a great forum for people to bring out the ideas and the things that we need to do to improve the company and to improve our processes improve our teams. The second soft skill is persuasion, or I like to call it influence your ability to influence a decision in the workplace will directly affect your chance for advancement. If you ever got a chance to work with senior leaders, especially the executive team, your ability to answer why to a problem is going to get their attention. It's going to set you up for success. So I'm going to say this again. Can you explain the why to a problem, you will get asked why and also your methodology by senior leaders. So when you go in front of senior leaders, you're presenting a project or as a member of a project team, and you're going to be presenting to the executive team, if you come in with the ability to answer the why have your portion of the presentation and also be able to clearly communicate and concisely communicate the methodology that you used in the numbers and also in the process, then the senior leaders are going to take notice. So bottom line is can you effectively communicate ideas are your part of the presentation clearly and concisely on point to the senior leaders that are in the room. And when I say influence influence is both up and down the organization. As a leader, we need to make sure that we are being transparent, and we are sharing critical information quickly. persuasion is about continually building credibility. And as with also senior leaders, and also with your team members. How we receive information is just as important as when we give out information. We need to make sure we're not jumping to conclusions, we need to make sure we are listening. And we're listening with very little bias and we need to do our research. Now. There's another issue when it comes to building and improving your credibility. I know that all of us have seen this many times. And that we need to make sure that we're not sending emails, when angry, we need to think about what was said in the email, we need to reread what was said in the email several times. And if it really does bother us, we need to walk away from it. never hit send an angry email response. If you feel like you've got to write something, just to get your thoughts out there. Don't write it in an email reply, go grab a blank Word document, go right out. Whatever you feel has bothered you. Maybe hit save, but never hit send. We must continually take a mature approach when responding to emails. I have definitely been at my best when I didn't hit send when I didn't feel very happy about what the email I just received. Don't hit send. soft skill number three is collaboration. Now how do we get people to talk and figure out a problem when they like to stay in their cubicles? The problem you are trying to solve may require the input of many other people and as a leader, do you want your team members who are more likely to stay in their cubicles or would like to get up and be part of a collaborative team and to solve problems? I know that as far as the leadership positions that I have, I've always encouraged
and definitely supported my team members to be part of a collaborative problem solving team because when you're trying to solve a problem pieces of information that you need, maybe spread out across the team across the department across the organization, you can't really solve a problem in a vacuum. You need others to help you do it. So when we develop our team members and also we bring in new candidates, we definitely want to somehow figure out how to test and ask the questions about someone's ability and preference to collaborate and talk with Others and develop team solutions. Collaboration is definitely the key to solving problems across the organization. Being on a project team is probably one of the best opportunities to collaborate across the organization. And it can also showcase all of your skills input from around the team and around the organization leads to better solutions. Now, most offices, the cubicles are probably in endless rows, which really don't encourage collaboration, I believe this circular or oval patterns are best, or even what I experienced in the Pentagon was incredible. It was two rows, but our desks faced out away from each other. And then we had the ability to swing into the middle around a table and a whiteboard to discuss and solve a problem. Again, on my team, it was two rows of four people each. So total of eight people, our desks faced out away from each other the two rows, we had a table in the middle. And when it was time to solve a problem, we swung back into the middle, we had a table and we had a whiteboard. And we were able to solve a problem, and then go back to do our piece of the problem and then be able to swing back again to the middle and present it. The fourth soft skill is adaptability. And I also like to call this change management because change is constant. Can you overcome a change that you don't like? Can you buy into a change that you don't necessarily believe in now. But that's a decision that was made, and you have to move forward? how stubborn are you how much are you going to be an obstacle to this change that's going to come into your organization are you going to be able to adapt or you be able to overcome that thing that you don't believe in, but you can see the merit of it in the long run if you start to dig into it and look into it, and to see how it's going to be implemented. Because a lot of the times when a change occurs, we have some kind of bias in our system, that's preventing us from seeing what this change is going to do for the organization as a whole. And that's how we need to look at this. What's this change going to do for the organization as a whole? What are the benefits that it's going to bring? And we need to quickly grasp on to those benefits, and apply it into our own teams. No one wants to stubborn person on the team that wants to fight every kind of change. Don't be that person? Can you be flexible when someone suggests a better way to do a task? The fifth soft skill was emotional intelligence. Are you aware of how you think and how you act? Are you aware of others emotions? Are you aware of your own bias? Do you put yourself first all the time? Do you have a problem with putting others first? Do you have any empathy at all? When it comes down to? Do you really know yourself? And can you recognize how you interact with others to others like to be around you? Do they like working with you? Are you a hard person to work with? Do you build and bridge relationships? Or do you destroy them? That's what emotional intelligence is really all about? Do you know yourself really well? And can you interact on a professional manner with others in your organization and work well with them towards a common goal towards the strategy towards the vision of the organization, that's what companies are looking for. I also want to close the soft skills with a very brief synopsis on strategic leadership. It's in the interest of all leaders to learn strategic leadership, especially if you're looking to advance your career. Now a lot of these soft skills had to do with how they fit into strategic leadership. strategic leadership is about influencing decisions for the long term success of the organization and seeing the organization as a whole seeing the future focusing on long term results instead of short term results. And it's really about critical thinking, if you start adding up about all the things that I talked about in the five critical soft skills that companies are looking for, according to the LinkedIn article that they put on their blog, and that's creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.
It's really all about becoming a better strategic leader. And if you're interested in advancing your career beyond manager, you really need to be grasping and developing and growing your soft skills. So you can become a better strategic leader that is looking at the organization as a whole looking towards the future and being able to influence decisions for the long term success of your organization. That's what it's really all about putting all these skills together along with your great technical skills and becoming a strategic leader a for an easy win today. I recommend that if you have the ability and the authority to do so that you review the job descriptions for your organization that you use to find candidates, and then start writing in some of these critical soft skills, especially after you do your own analysis for your organization, the ones that you believe are important, and I would definitely look at changing the hiring process again, if you have the ability and authority to do so at least recommend the changes to start Putting in a way to assess soft skills of future candidates to figure out how to test them. And really start thinking about changing your mindset around looking at the soft skills instead of just the technical hard skills, because it's going to make your teams a lot better and the organization as a whole a lot better. This episode we talked about critical soft skills that were published in the LinkedIn blog in January of 2020, and how they can apply to our finance and accounting teams. Next week, I'm going to talk about professional licenses and certifications that will help enhance your credibility and also improve your chance to advance in your career. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader Podcast. I am dedicated to helping you grow your leadership. You can get this episode wherever you find podcasts. Please join our community on Facebook, the finance leader podcast Facebook group, this will be our community to grow with the finance and accounting profession. This episode is sponsored by my new online course offerings through finance leader Academy. It's called Advanced your career developing a promotion strategy for your finance and accounting career. You can go to Stephen McLain comm and select star from the menu to find the course until next time, you can check out more resources at my website Stephen McLain calm and sign up for my updates so you don't miss an episode of the show. And now go lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:08.000
Soft skills can be the major factor for your success in the workplace or not how well can you get along with others in the office? How well can you adapt to change or communicate a new idea? I believe that when hiring, consider the candidate soft skills first, you can much more easily develop the technical skills later. Enjoy the episode today. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. I want to address a few issues that prevent us as leaders to move forward making our teams and our organizations better. We often are not properly prioritizing or synchronizing team tasks properly. I believe this to be a major leader task, we need to make sure that our team members are doing the tasks in the right order and the right priority that will make our team work better. And our organizations better. There are two leadership extremes that I really don't like. And I have addressed those in prior episodes. One is the micromanager and that's for obvious reasons. And then also the leader who puts everything on autopilot, the autopilot will say, I hold my team accountable. And that sounds good initially, but you can't find this type of leader until something goes wrong. And I believe you need to find a balance between later your team do the work, and also being present to guide the process and to eliminate any kind of conflict, and also to prioritize what the team is doing to ensure the team is doing the right tasks in the right order. And let's talk very briefly again about processes. Often our processes don't work. And that's why there's frustration, what we need to do is write down the processes we need to map them out. And then we need to create a way to continually review and improve these processes. And I'm challenging you all out there. All of you who are working in the finance and accounting teams to write down your processes, review them and find a way to make them better. And I would say you need to do that at least quarterly. This is episode number 12 of the podcast. And today we're going to talk about critical soft skills. Peggy Klaus, who has trained executives at top companies like Disney and Sony Pictures said soft skills get little respect, but they will make or break your career. I wanted to do an episode on the importance of soft skills, because these really determine how you interact with people interact within the structure of the organization. And I'm going to continually recommend that organizations consider a candidate soft skills first and the technical skills. Second, we tend to hire people on our accounting and finance teams that do an incredible job when it comes to managing a spreadsheet going into databases, pulling out the numbers and doing some really beautiful analysis. However, the same people who are so technically savvy with Excel, and with databases, and with putting together projections and knowing how to do monthly close and can do some analysis and know how to do journal entries. The same people can't interact with anybody. They can't work on a collaborative team, they can't give input, or they can't respect other people's opinions. They're very good at doing their job, but they're in front of their screens, and they're doing whatever task you've given to them. They're great. But in today's workplace, we really want people who are strong in the soft skills that we're going to talk about today. These same soft skills help you to interact with people and processes and process improvement and the organization as a whole. The same soft skills also highlight your character, your likeability and then your long term potential for advancement in your career. Back in January of this year, the LinkedIn blog published a list of top in demand soft skills. These skills are what companies are looking for right now. And the five soft skills that I want to highlight our creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. And I want to take you through all five of these and how I see them and how they apply to our finance and accounting teams. Now creativity is the first one
and that's about developing solutions to complex problems across the company. And I believe that it's about continuous improvement, and not following the status quo as finance and accounting professionals We sometimes have a hard time with change, or with coming up with something different. We like to stay in our every day list of tasks or everyday things that we need to get done. And we'd like to stay in that same process, what I want to challenge you to do, and as you grow this skill of creativity is to find a better and a simpler and more streamlined and even cost effective solution to whatever problems that we're facing, whatever, whatever area of our processes that need to be fixed, we want to find a more creative solution to it. And don't be afraid to bring up those solutions. And the other thing that I want to challenge leaders out there is that we need to protect the ability for our team members to bring us solutions, even unpopular solutions. Because if you don't do that, you're not going to get any input whatsoever. If someone's going to feel afraid, because of someone's reaction, or even team members reactions to bringing up a good idea that no one's going to bring up those good ideas. I've said this before in a few other episodes, and I continue to talk about this with everyone who have a chance to discuss leadership skills with is that as a leader, you just need to create a great environment and a great forum for people to bring out the ideas and the things that we need to do to improve the company and to improve our processes improve our teams. The second soft skill is persuasion, or I like to call it influence your ability to influence a decision in the workplace will directly affect your chance for advancement. If you ever got a chance to work with senior leaders, especially the executive team, your ability to answer why to a problem is going to get their attention. It's going to set you up for success. So I'm going to say this again. Can you explain the why to a problem, you will get asked why and also your methodology by senior leaders. So when you go in front of senior leaders, you're presenting a project or as a member of a project team, and you're going to be presenting to the executive team, if you come in with the ability to answer the why have your portion of the presentation and also be able to clearly communicate and concisely communicate the methodology that you used in the numbers and also in the process, then the senior leaders are going to take notice. So bottom line is can you effectively communicate ideas are your part of the presentation clearly and concisely on point to the senior leaders that are in the room. And when I say influence influence is both up and down the organization. As a leader, we need to make sure that we are being transparent, and we are sharing critical information quickly. persuasion is about continually building credibility. And as with also senior leaders, and also with your team members. How we receive information is just as important as when we give out information. We need to make sure we're not jumping to conclusions, we need to make sure we are listening. And we're listening with very little bias and we need to do our research. Now. There's another issue when it comes to building and improving your credibility. I know that all of us have seen this many times. And that we need to make sure that we're not sending emails, when angry, we need to think about what was said in the email, we need to reread what was said in the email several times. And if it really does bother us, we need to walk away from it. never hit send an angry email response. If you feel like you've got to write something, just to get your thoughts out there. Don't write it in an email reply, go grab a blank Word document, go right out. Whatever you feel has bothered you. Maybe hit save, but never hit send. We must continually take a mature approach when responding to emails. I have definitely been at my best when I didn't hit send when I didn't feel very happy about what the email I just received. Don't hit send. soft skill number three is collaboration. Now how do we get people to talk and figure out a problem when they like to stay in their cubicles? The problem you are trying to solve may require the input of many other people and as a leader, do you want your team members who are more likely to stay in their cubicles or would like to get up and be part of a collaborative team and to solve problems? I know that as far as the leadership positions that I have, I've always encouraged
and definitely supported my team members to be part of a collaborative problem solving team because when you're trying to solve a problem pieces of information that you need, maybe spread out across the team across the department across the organization, you can't really solve a problem in a vacuum. You need others to help you do it. So when we develop our team members and also we bring in new candidates, we definitely want to somehow figure out how to test and ask the questions about someone's ability and preference to collaborate and talk with Others and develop team solutions. Collaboration is definitely the key to solving problems across the organization. Being on a project team is probably one of the best opportunities to collaborate across the organization. And it can also showcase all of your skills input from around the team and around the organization leads to better solutions. Now, most offices, the cubicles are probably in endless rows, which really don't encourage collaboration, I believe this circular or oval patterns are best, or even what I experienced in the Pentagon was incredible. It was two rows, but our desks faced out away from each other. And then we had the ability to swing into the middle around a table and a whiteboard to discuss and solve a problem. Again, on my team, it was two rows of four people each. So total of eight people, our desks faced out away from each other the two rows, we had a table in the middle. And when it was time to solve a problem, we swung back into the middle, we had a table and we had a whiteboard. And we were able to solve a problem, and then go back to do our piece of the problem and then be able to swing back again to the middle and present it. The fourth soft skill is adaptability. And I also like to call this change management because change is constant. Can you overcome a change that you don't like? Can you buy into a change that you don't necessarily believe in now. But that's a decision that was made, and you have to move forward? how stubborn are you how much are you going to be an obstacle to this change that's going to come into your organization are you going to be able to adapt or you be able to overcome that thing that you don't believe in, but you can see the merit of it in the long run if you start to dig into it and look into it, and to see how it's going to be implemented. Because a lot of the times when a change occurs, we have some kind of bias in our system, that's preventing us from seeing what this change is going to do for the organization as a whole. And that's how we need to look at this. What's this change going to do for the organization as a whole? What are the benefits that it's going to bring? And we need to quickly grasp on to those benefits, and apply it into our own teams. No one wants to stubborn person on the team that wants to fight every kind of change. Don't be that person? Can you be flexible when someone suggests a better way to do a task? The fifth soft skill was emotional intelligence. Are you aware of how you think and how you act? Are you aware of others emotions? Are you aware of your own bias? Do you put yourself first all the time? Do you have a problem with putting others first? Do you have any empathy at all? When it comes down to? Do you really know yourself? And can you recognize how you interact with others to others like to be around you? Do they like working with you? Are you a hard person to work with? Do you build and bridge relationships? Or do you destroy them? That's what emotional intelligence is really all about? Do you know yourself really well? And can you interact on a professional manner with others in your organization and work well with them towards a common goal towards the strategy towards the vision of the organization, that's what companies are looking for. I also want to close the soft skills with a very brief synopsis on strategic leadership. It's in the interest of all leaders to learn strategic leadership, especially if you're looking to advance your career. Now a lot of these soft skills had to do with how they fit into strategic leadership. strategic leadership is about influencing decisions for the long term success of the organization and seeing the organization as a whole seeing the future focusing on long term results instead of short term results. And it's really about critical thinking, if you start adding up about all the things that I talked about in the five critical soft skills that companies are looking for, according to the LinkedIn article that they put on their blog, and that's creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.
It's really all about becoming a better strategic leader. And if you're interested in advancing your career beyond manager, you really need to be grasping and developing and growing your soft skills. So you can become a better strategic leader that is looking at the organization as a whole looking towards the future and being able to influence decisions for the long term success of your organization. That's what it's really all about putting all these skills together along with your great technical skills and becoming a strategic leader a for an easy win today. I recommend that if you have the ability and the authority to do so that you review the job descriptions for your organization that you use to find candidates, and then start writing in some of these critical soft skills, especially after you do your own analysis for your organization, the ones that you believe are important, and I would definitely look at changing the hiring process again, if you have the ability and authority to do so at least recommend the changes to start Putting in a way to assess soft skills of future candidates to figure out how to test them. And really start thinking about changing your mindset around looking at the soft skills instead of just the technical hard skills, because it's going to make your teams a lot better and the organization as a whole a lot better. This episode we talked about critical soft skills that were published in the LinkedIn blog in January of 2020, and how they can apply to our finance and accounting teams. Next week, I'm going to talk about professional licenses and certifications that will help enhance your credibility and also improve your chance to advance in your career. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader Podcast. I am dedicated to helping you grow your leadership. You can get this episode wherever you find podcasts. Please join our community on Facebook, the finance leader podcast Facebook group, this will be our community to grow with the finance and accounting profession. This episode is sponsored by my new online course offerings through finance leader Academy. It's called Advanced your career developing a promotion strategy for your finance and accounting career. You can go to Stephen McLain comm and select star from the menu to find the course until next time, you can check out more resources at my website Stephen McLain calm and sign up for my updates so you don't miss an episode of the show. And now go lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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