10 Skills That Matter Most at Work

Your skills at work matter—not only the core skills that justify your designation, but also the ones that help you connect, collaborate, navigate challenges, solve complex problems and most importantly enable you to do impactful work.

While the more skills you have, the better placed you’re to get more responsibilities, more autonomy and more trust from others, not all skills are equally valued and trying to excel in everything will prevent you from being good at skills that actually matter. 

These skills can’t be assigned to you as tasks by your manager or improved by simply reading books. You need to practice them, gather feedback, adapt and keep applying them until they turn into a habit. 

Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.
― Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

Once you have these skills as tools in your toolkit, you’ll not only stand out, be recognized and appreciated at work, but bigger responsibilities, better opportunities and more challenging work will land your way. You’ll gain confidence, trust and respect from higher-ups to build better products and lead initiatives that can have a huge impact on the entire organization. 

Here are the 10 things that matter most at work:

High agency

Many things can go wrong at work—conflicting priorities, unknown problems, uncertainty of decisions, misalignment of expectations, communication gaps, unrealistic deadlines and so on.

Adopting a victim mentality in such cases prevents you from thinking clearly, finding solutions and moving forward. Assuming others are the source of your problem prevents you from taking responsibility and feeling in control of your outcomes. 

Difficult situations come with many unknowns and challenges. Navigating them requires becoming a high agency person. 

High agency is about finding a way to get what you want, without waiting for the conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming the circumstances. High agency people either push through in the face of adversity or they manage to reverse it to achieve their goals. They either find a way, or they make a way.

It is a sense of control over your own behaviors, decisions and actions in shaping up your life as opposed to relying on external circumstances, conditions and environment to decide what you can and cannot do. 

Instead of considering other people’s limits as their own limits and fitting inside a box based on what others deem possible, high agency people expand their boundaries of influence, push themselves to navigate the uncharted territory and do the work that’s necessary to succeed.

High agency isn’t about dismissing negative emotions by saying things like: 

Be positive!

Get over it and move on!

Look on the bright side.

It isn’t about hiding uncomfortable feelings or providing false reassurances. High agency is the optimism needed to navigate difficult circumstances. It’s the courage to act despite feeling those feelings; staying optimistic while staying real. 

To become a high agency person, you don’t need special talents or knowledge. All you need is:

• Relentless drive to look for solutions instead of complaining about the problem. 
• When you fail or make mistakes while navigating a difficult situation, feel disappointed much like everyone else, but don’t let that disappointment get in the way of taking action or making progress.
• Put your network to good use. Brainstorm ideas, seek advice. Ask for help when you need it. 

Jim Dethmer calls this “taking radical responsibility.” 

When we place blame, we locate the cause and control of our lives outside ourselves. When we take responsibility, we locate the cause and control of our lives inside ourselves.
— Jim Dethmer, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

In a difficult situation, good solutions start to emerge when you take responsibility instead of blaming someone or something else for your situation. 

Influence 

To do well at work, you need people on your side. People who trust you, listen to your ideas, value your experience and those who want to help you succeed. 

Anyone can come up with a great idea, a better solution or different choices to make an optimal decision. The hard part isn’t doing the work, it’s getting buy-in from others.

If you can’t sway people in your direction, if you can’t persuade them to see it your way, all the time and effort you have put into something can go to waste. Not getting the alignment you seek can also leave you feeling frustrated, angry and annoyed because once your mind is stuck on a certain possibility, it’s hard to erase it and let it go. 

Why don’t they get me?

Why won’t they listen to me?

Why would they choose an inferior option? 

The ability to influence others is an essential skill to practice and master because the impact you create at work is directly tied to it. Influence not only increases your impact by enabling you to get more done, getting others to support your initiatives and adopt your ideas can build the confidence to try unconventional methods, explore unique possibilities and challenge the status quo. 

Persuasion skills exert a far greater influence over others’ behaviors than formal power structure do.
— Robert B. Cialdini 

Build your own path to influence using these 5 practices:

1. A positive intent to work together and collaborate can encourage others to seek your opinion while a negative intent can lead to a pushback or just ignore you. Always start with intent. Clearly lay it out in a way that aligns with a common goal. 
2. Adapt your tone, content and conversational style to match others expectations. Make it easy for them to connect and value your perspective.
3. Don’t hide your talent. Lead from the front, share learnings and help others build valuable skills.   
4. Gather feedback, seek inputs and tweak your message to make it easy for others to listen and reach a common conclusion.
5. Finally, becoming influential is like running a marathon, it’s not a sprint. Don’t rush through it. Pause and connect with people along the way. 

Influence at work plays a big role in making contributions, doing work that matters and being impactful in your role. Convincing others to your ideas, swaying their thinking to see things your way or aligning them on mutually agreeable goals is a superpower that everyone must work to build.

Grit

We look at talent and choose to be amazed by its presence — 

Wow, she’s a natural! 

He must be really talented! 

She’s gifted! 

He’s a genius! 

It’s easy to attribute performance to talent without factoring in the labor that goes into excellence behind the scenes. Feeling thrilled by the outcome while ignoring the input that went into generating that outcome. 

When we fall for the mystery of talent and fail to realize that talent, effort, and achievement go together, it makes giving up so easy.

I can never be that! 

I am not talented enough! 

We can fool ourselves into believing we don’t have what it takes and quit the attitude to even try.

Building ability requires curiosity to push ahead, ability to focus, determination, and hard work while seeking challenges and consistently practicing to get better at your game. 

You may have all the talent in the world, but without determination, effort, and persistence you won’t get very far.

Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. Talent— how fast we improve in skill—absolutely matters. But effort factors into the calculations twice, not once. Effort builds skill. At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.
— Angela Duckworth, Grit

Stop marveling at the talent and start showing grit. It’s not your talent, but rather your perseverance and effort that will decide where you end up.

Creative thinking 

Remember all that curiosity you had as a child that annoyed your teachers and parents when you asked too many questions:

Why do I have to go to school?

Why do I have to sleep early when you can be awake till late?

Why can’t I play video games?

Why do I have to finish my homework?

Curiosity and the ability to express that curiosity constructively is a great skill to have even when you’re an adult. It allows you to look at things differently and come up with new solutions to problems. Without curiosity, you accept the status quo and assume things only work a certain way. You can’t be creative if you keep your curiosity hidden and fail to unleash it.  

To build creative thinking skills, wake up your curious mind and put it to use:

1. Challenge and question assumptions.
2. Expand your circle of competence by gaining knowledge from outside your current scope of work. It will enable you to combine various types of information in your head in new and novel ways. For example: meet with other functions within your organization to understand how they operate, what their challenges are and how they make decisions. 
3. Create mental space for new ideas to kick in. Incorporate thinking time into your calendar.

Creativity isn’t a switch that’s flicked on or off; it’s a way of seeing, engaging and responding to the world around you.
― Rod Judkins, The Art of Creative Thinking

Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. If you want to be creative, get curious. 

Mental agility 

When you do things you have always done or the ones that make you comfortable, you give limited opportunities to your brain to grow. 

Your brain learns to associate certainty with safety and anything uncertain as a threat. Sitting within the bounds of your comfort zone makes mental agility impossible—how can you think quickly in an unpredictable situation when your mind is engulfed with fear, anxiety and worry?

Pushing yourself to do new things or the ones that make you uncomfortable tunes your brain to accept discomfort as a part of life—you stop seeing change as a threat, become more open to diverse ideas and learn to navigate complexity instead of avoiding it. When your brain is not overwhelmed by strong emotions, it can think clearly. You can move quickly between different ideas and respond to events in a flexible way.   

To step outside your comfort zone:

1. Challenge yourself to solve hard problems. Seek opportunities that require you to solve problems that you have never solved before.
2. Learn something new. It doesn’t even have to be work-related. How about the piano classes, tennis lessons, mastering French or taking cooking classes that you keep putting off?
3. Set yourself a difficult goal and work on it consistently. For example: push yourself to exercise for 30 days without a break. 

Real change is difficult at the beginning, but gorgeous at the end. Change begins the moment you get the courage and step outside your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.
― Roy T. Bennett

Your brain loves a challenge and challenging it frequently will keep it mentally agile. 

Navigating conflicts

Conflicts scare us. They put our amygdala on overdrive leading to a flight-or-fight situation. We either try to avoid the conflict by putting it off for too long or try to fight it by proving we are right and others are wrong. 

But conflicts are how we learn about our differences of opinions, faulty assumptions or errors in our judgment. Without conflicts, we will make biased, mediocre and poor decisions. 

Learning to face conflicts, even though they’re uncomfortable at first, is a crucial skill to build and master. 

Face conflicts head on. Avoidance makes whatever you’re trying to avoid extremely difficult to tackle later on. Attending the conflict at the right time prevents the problem from turning worse. 

Approach difficult conversations not with the intent to win, but with the intent to work out an approach that’s acceptable to all the parties. Win-lose mentality shuts down dialogue and leaves one side unhappy and disgruntled. Win-win mentality on the other hand encourages exchange of ideas and keeps everyone aligned and delighted. 

To manage conflicts well:

1. Take control of your emotions: Don’t deny or disengage with your emotions. Recognize them, accept them and then guide them into constructive action instead of engaging in destructive behaviors.
2. Put things in perspective: Show willingness to change your mind by challenging your thoughts, accepting that you might be wrong and detaching your ideas from your identity.
3. Focus on what can be controlled: Let go of things you can’t control and put all your time and energy on things within your control.

Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
— William James

All the knowledge and experience in the world is of no use if you can’t navigate conflicts and align people towards a common goal. Learning to do it well not only improves your productivity and performance, but also ensures you get the results without compromising on your mental well-being. 

Productive partnerships  

The stronger are your work relationships, the easier it is to connect, collaborate and achieve goals. Relationships―built up over time―is the essential ingredient to be successful at work. 

People are more likely to engage with you when they feel a positive connection built using shared values, trust and mutual respect. They are more likely to value your opinions and follow your lead. But doing this takes time. You can’t force or fake your way into it. Manipulating others to like you, respect you or even trust you is short-lived. Others can eventually make out if you were genuine or just faking it. 

Build trustworthy and long-lasting relationships without the expectation to get something from others. 

1. Show interest in others thoughts, ideas and beliefs. 
2. Offer support and help when they are struggling.
3. Address misunderstandings openly and respectfully.
4. Appreciate and recognize them for their good work.
5. Be honest and transparent in your interactions.
6. Build trust by being dependable and taking accountability.
7. Respect boundaries and differences in work habits and communication styles. 

Personal relationships are the fertile soil from which all advancement, all success, all achievement in real life grows.
― Tony Dungy, The Mentor Leader

Building rapport plays a significant role in being successful at work. Invest in it. Play a long game.

Active listening

How do you feel when you’re not being heard—frustrated, annoyed and angry at the other person? Do you feel like they don’t really know you or they don’t really get who you are? This is exactly how others feel when you don’t listen.

Listening poorly limits your understanding of others which deprives you from bonding, building trust, learning, growing and most important of all, evolving as a human being.

There’s a cost to not listening—stress in the workplace, poor relationships, misunderstandings, errors, missed opportunities, arguments, stalled projects, avoidable conflicts, and wasted time.

How you listen and respond to others has a significant impact on the quality of your relationships—be it workplace, family or friends. 

Nothing hurts more than the sense that the people we care about aren’t really listening. We never outgrow the need to have our feelings known.
― Michael P. Nichols, The Lost Art of Listening

Use these 5 practices to become a better listener:

1. Words convey only part of the story. Someone’s true intent or what they believe is often hidden and invisible to us. Dig deeper and go beyond words. 
2. Your body language—tone of voice, gestures and facial expressions speak louder than your words. Ensure your body language is curious, respectful and kind. 
3. Interrupting others is a common habit that leaves others feeling unheard, undervalued and dismissed. You can’t listen well if you aren’t willing to hold off your tongue and give others a chance to complete. 
4. We like to create stories in our mind that fit our preconceived ideas, beliefs and perceptions. Good listening involves putting your opinions and judgments aside to create space for curiosity and thoughtfulness.
5. When we enter conversations with the intent to make ourselves understood, we lose the opportunity to understand others. Start with understanding others first. Hear them out. They may reciprocate and respond in kind.

Listening well makes it possible to align on shared goals, explore different possibilities and make unbiased decisions. It gives us a perspective that’s otherwise hard to get because of our own thoughts, beliefs, experiences and expectations.

Bridging communication gaps

Communication problems are the source of a lot of misery at work. They lead to expectation mismatch, misalignment, confusion and even friction between people. 

When communication breaks down, project deadlines are missed, stakeholders lose trust and business suffers. Poor communication makes it hard to get things done and achieve success. 

Learning to converse with others is one of the most important skills at work—we all need to learn and improve upon it. It requires conscious effort to hash things out, embrace uncomfortable conversations and desire to listen and learn from others.  

Make communication less painful and more productive for everyone using these practices:

1. Seek alignment on priorities and agree on a common measure of success. Success is more likely when everyone works on shared goals.
2. Expecting others to register key information by saying it once is a big mistake. Unless you repeat it multiple times, it will not get the time and attention it deserves.
3. Good questions have the power to unlock creative thinking and surface out hidden problems. Use every opportunity to explore your curiosity by asking questions.
4. Assumptions when not validated can lead to gaps in expectations. Avoid frustration, angst and anxiety by seeking alignment upfront.
5. Blaming, shaming and complaining does not solve problems. Instead of pointing fingers, identify what caused these communication gaps and how you can avoid them in the future.

Words matter. Words shape worldviews. Words provoke action and reaction, which in turn provoke more words. Getting the words right is critically important. Getting the action right is also critically important. And aligning the words and actions is even more important.
― Helio Fred Garcia, The Power of Communication

When we don’t make the effort to communicate well, a lot of time is wasted in resolving issues that creep up due to misalignment, confusion and expectation mismatch. Communication can be less chaotic when everyone commits to resolving differences proactively instead of relying on others.

Thinking Big

What you think is possible can place the boundary on what you can accomplish. While a scarcity mindset can get in the way of your dreams and make you settle for less with the assumption that your desires are unrealistic, an abundant mindset makes everything appear within reach.  

Scarcity mindset considers the limitations of a situation by focusing on the negatives, while an abundance mindset considers the opportunities in a situation by focusing on areas of growth and improvement.

Lead with a long-term view. Imagine yourself calm and confident leading exactly the kind of life you want to live. Project your desires into the future:

• How do you see yourself a few years from now?
• What is that person doing?
• What behaviors and characteristics that person must have demonstrated to end up where they are now?
• How can you incorporate those behaviors and attitudes into your daily life?

The ability to think big is the first step to break out of your bubble of self-imposed limits, channel your energy to explore a bigger and better future, and map out the path ahead to make it possible. Thinking big sets the direction. To make progress, take tiny steps along the way—re-evaluate your strategies, reconsider your options, adjust and adapt. 

The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief.
― David Schwartz , The Magic of Thinking Big 

Flexibility in thinking and action can take you far and wide—with more options, more choices, and more resources. 

Summary 

1. Staying resilient in the face of adversity, navigating unknowns and uncertainties without being constrained by what other people deem possible is the most admired and sought after skill at work. Become a high agency person—look beyond the artificial boundaries to explore the world of possibilities, find a way that others didn’t know existed.
2. All your great ideas, experience and knowledge is wasted if others can’t appreciate it and put it to good use. Swaying people in your direction requires earning their trust, respect and confidence. Become influential. Build an army of advocates who are keen to adopt your ideas and support your initiatives. 
3. Talent can get you the right opportunities, but it can’t make you stick around when things end up being difficult or don’t turn out as expected. Grit—a combination of determination, effort and perseverance is the key to long-term success, not talent. 
4. Curious people stand out at work because of their ability to think differently. They’re able to make connections, draw patterns and think creatively. They challenge the status quo, solve problems in unique ways and don’t limit themselves to their current scope of work. Become curious to expand your creative thinking skills—it’s rare and always in demand at work. 
5. When dealing with an unpredictable situation, an unexpected change or uncertainty, what do you need to identify the best way to move forward? Mental agility. To build mental agility, purposefully step outside your comfort zone. It will align your brain to accept discomfort as a part of life instead of avoiding it.
6. Avoiding conflicts or putting them off for too long may be your default response because conflicts evoke strong feelings of fear, resentment, doubt and other negative emotions. But not handling the conflict at the right time makes whatever you’re trying to avoid unmanageable and  worse. Face the conflict head on even if it’s uncomfortable at first. 
7. When you spend all your time doing work and ignore building relationships with people at work, it makes collaborating with them much harder. Personal connections built using shared values, trust and mutual respect goes a long way in setting you up for success. Take time to know others—show genuine interest in their thoughts, ideas and beliefs. 
8. Most of us are poor listeners—we interrupt others, complete their sentences and pay more attention to what we are going to say next instead of paying attention to their words. Not listening actively leads to misunderstandings, expectation mismatch and wasted time. Start with understanding others first, hear them out. It will improve decision making, aligning on shared goals and help you achieve desired results much faster. 
9. We are quick to pass blame when communication issues crop up at work without realizing that we too have a part to play in it. Communication can never be perfect, but an effort can be made to bridge the gap by proactively taking control of how you connect and communicate with others. Take responsibility to make this better for everyone. Communicate more, not less.
10. How we think places a limit on what we can achieve. Thinking small minimizes our desires and maximizes our concerns while thinking big gives us an open playing field where we are able to utilize our true potential. Lead with an abundance mindset, assume everything is within reach with effort and persistence.

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