As a leader within your organization, you likely seek out employees who possess the essential qualities to guide others toward company objectives, thrive in teamwork, and excel in collaborative endeavors. Yet, you may not be aware that these traits, along with others, have been recently referred to as power skills.
Over the years, leaders have come to realize that this set of highly valuable traits helps individuals adapt, make better decisions, and be more innovative.
But how to reflect this in the way teams are recruited, built and trained?
This article explains all you need to know about power skills and how you can foster these to build the high-performing teams your organization needs to reach new heights.
What are Power Skills?
If you’re wanting to know more about power skills, you’ve possibly heard the terms hard skills and soft skills.
Even if you already know these terms very well, before better understanding the meaning of power skills, we need to recap:
Hard Skills
Hard skills are specific skills or knowledge that can be taught, measured and quantified.
Examples and characteristics of hard skills:
- A designer who masters a tool like Photoshop
- An expert contract lawyer
- A programmer who mastered Python development
- A sales pro who can pitch and close sales in three different languages
- A marketer specialized in tracking and metrics
Hard skills are skills that are easier to identify and evaluate.
For example, a company might ask applicants for a design position to create a piece based on a specific brief, or ask a marketer to come up with a plan to generate qualified leads.
This clearly demonstrates the candidates’ technical and practical ability in this field.
Hard skills are directly relevant to a particular job or industry and are essential to perform specific tasks and responsibilities and can be imparted through education, training and certification.
Soft Skills
Soft skills are attributes and qualities that enable people to interact effectively with others, navigate social situations with authenticity and contribute positively in various personal and professional contexts.
Unlike hard skills, which are typically technical and job-specific, soft skills are more about how people interact and work together.
Basically, doing what humans do best: adapting, learning, shining. And repeating. With a little help from the group, standing in the shoulders of giants.
Power Skills: The Evolution of Soft Skills
The term power skills has been increasingly used as a synonym for the term soft skills.
Perhaps this gradual change is to do justice to the skills contained in this umbrella, since they are far from “soft”.
In fact, the opposite is true: power skills are harder to get, take longer to develop, cannot be transferred, and are difficult to assess, identify, and teach.
It is not new that these skills are coveted by companies. Communication appears as the most sought-after skill by companies, being cited by 78% of respondents in this Linkedin survey conducted with recruitment professionals.
Power skills are on the rise
While it appears to be just a name change, there’s a lot more involved.
The pandemic and the remote and hybrid work environment brought changes to the meaning of professional success.
In addition, new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, have made it easier to acquire and automate hard skills, while at the same time demanding more and more flexibility and critical analysis skills from professionals to adapt to an increasingly changing scenario, fast.
Power skills are an increasingly valuable asset in today’s jobs. Deloitte predicts that power skill-intensive occupations will account for two-thirds of all jobs by 2030, up from half of all jobs in 2000.
Also due to the advancement of diversity and inclusion guidelines, many companies are seeking to make their hiring based on skills, taking the focus away from graduations in reputable universities, which tend to be accessible only to a small heterogeneous group of people.
Power skills and hard skills complement each other, in the sense that power skills are the human side that contribute to a performance that hard skills alone cannot fully address.
12 Power Skills to Future-proof Teams
Communication
Communication often tops lists of most sought-after skills by companies.
Communication is the ability to effectively transfer information both in writing and verbally. It also includes active listening to people with empathy.
When an employee has effective communication skills, they are able to be productive, more understanding, and encourage collaboration.
Collaboration and Teamwork
When a person has collaboration skills, they work well with others to reach company goals.
These employees are skilled at building positive relationships and contributing to the team’s goals.
When an employee has strong collaboration skills and masters teamwork, they are more open to different and diverse perspectives, have no problem asking for help and can solve conflicts that eventually come up.
Problem Solving and Critical Thinking
Problem solving and critical thinking skills allow an employee to analyze complex situations and step up to make decisions.
They can see the big picture and identify challenges and opportunities, coming up with innovative solutions. Those with strong critical thinking are creative and have the capacity to make sound and reasonable decisions.
Flexibility and adaptability
Those that are flexible have the capability to embrace change and adapt to new situations or technology. Technology continues to advance, and those with digital literacy are better able to adapt to new tools and processes.
In addition, unexpected changes don’t throw them. They are ready to adapt to any changes as they come. Some even actually thrive in change.
Flexible people are able to upskill and reskill fast and adjust the way they approach the many different challenges any organization needs to face.
Self-direction
It is the role of the company to communicate to people what is expected of them and provide all the necessary support for it to happen. But when this is combined with individuals capable of autonomously solving problems and making things happen, that is pure gold.
This skill is specially important in remote and hybrid environments, with teams spread around the world, working in different timezones.
Self-direction in the workplace refers to an individual’s ability and initiative to manage their own tasks, goals, and responsibilities without constant supervision or explicit direction from higher-ups.
Cultural intelligence
Cultural intelligence is the ability to understand, adapt to, and work effectively with people from different cultural backgrounds.
It’s an essential skill in today’s diverse and interconnected workplaces and is essencial to help organizations achieve DEI and ESG goals.
Cultural intelligence goes beyond basic cultural awareness and sensitivity; it involves the capacity to navigate complex cultural dynamics, communicate effectively, and build relationships across cultures.
Emotional awareness
Being emotionally intelligent means to recognize, understand, and manage one’s own emotions, and also being able to understand and be empathetic with the emotions of others.
Empathy is a sign of emotional maturity. In this research, 76% of people with highly empathic senior leaders report often or always being engaged, compared to only 32% of people with less empathic senior leaders.
Being emotionally savvy involves being attuned to emotional cues, both verbal and nonverbal, and having the skills to navigate and respond to emotions effectively.
Influence with or without authority
Becoming an influencer in the workplace involves building credibility to effectively promote one’s ideas, gaining the support of colleagues and superiors to drive positive change, with a genuine commitment to adding value to the business.
Time management
Having good time management skills means effectively and efficiently organizing, prioritizing, and utilizing your time to achieve tasks, goals, and responsibilities.
It involves making conscious choices about how to allocate the time to different activities (and that involves knowing when and how to say no) in a way that maximizes productivity and minimizes stress.
People’s attention span is decreasing at a rapid rate and the number of distractions is only increasing, hurting people’s ability to focus on important tasks for as long as necessary, which makes time management skills even more important.
A person that knows how to manage their time is also more prone to be sensible about other people’s time, being on time for meetings and respecting deadlines.
Time traveling
The power of time travel brings many benefits to an organization. A person who understands industry and market trends is better equipped to develop the solutions the company needs to take advantage of market opportunities and prepare for challenges.
In addition to keeping an eye on the future, people with this skill also know how to analyze the past to forecast scenarios and gain insights.
Resourcefulness
Resourceful people have the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. People with this skill do what they can with what they have, focusing on what’s under their control.
A resourceful individual is skilled at finding practical solutions, making the most of limited or unconventional resources, and adapting to changing circumstances.
Work Ethics
Strong work ethics are essential for maintaining professionalism, fostering a positive work culture, and achieving individual and organizational success.
More and more organizations are waking up to the need to focus their initiatives around people, not only the team but also consumers and the entire human chain an organization impacts.
In a scenario where there is no more space for situations of moral harassment at work, the focus is stronger on building positive values, making people feel they belong and are respected.
How to reflect power skills in the people strategy?
We’ve already talked about how, unlike hard skills, power skills are difficult to identify, assess and teach.
But that doesn’t mean the company can’t be a driver of a more people-centric mindset and develop professionals who are constantly advancing in the field of power skills.
Here are some tips to reflect power skills in the people management strategy:
Identify and assess the ones that are more critical to business success
First, you must understand which soft skills are most critical for your business goals, job roles, and desired outcomes.
Employee surveys, self-assessment and supervisor feedback are ways to assess where people are in terms of their power skills.
Trace specific training programs
Your company should create training programs that are engaging, interactive, and focused on developing those specific soft skills. A mix of training methods is best. Consider offering different types of formats in your training plan like workshops, role-playing exercises, group discussions and e-learning modules.
Consider hiring skilled trainers or coaches who specialize in the specific soft skills being targeted. These coaches must have expertise in providing this type of training for corporate learners.
Training in power skills can include:
- Training for awareness on DEI topics
- Training on Effective Communication in the Workplace
- Training on good practices for remote and hybrid work
Foster lifelong learning
Lifelong learning empowers employees to take control of their own development, boosting their confidence and sense of ownership in their careers.
By supporting employees in their continuous development, organizations position themselves for long-term success and growth in an ever-changing world.
Review your hiring requirements
Many companies are making the shift to skill-based hiring models, making room for more diversity in the workplace.
Create a mentoring program
Give people access to the minds of the company’s best talents, with mentoring programs where professionals can pass on their career lessons.
Promote a culture of trust in leadership
The vast majority of people perform better when they are trusted with the autonomy to make decisions that are in their control, without micromanagement. In leadership training plans, include building a culture of trust as a discussion topic.
Check for inconsistencies
It is no use for an organization to offer training for people to embrace diversity, when diversity is not reflected in any hiring and internal mobility practices focused on diversity.
It makes no sense to promote time management workshops for professionals with work overload and unrealistic deadlines.
People with high power skills, within the critical sense that is characteristic of them, will clearly perceive when the company does not walk the walk.
Final thoughts
Power skills are subjective and harder to identify and measure. In contrast, hard skills are objective, quantifiable abilities learned through formal education and workplace training.
Power skills in the workplace complement technical skills and are relevant to various job roles across diverse industries.
Voxy supports corporate customers in over 150 countries with access to live language coaching led by certified teachers and an extensive library of role-specific courses that fill crucial soft and technical skill gaps.
Click here to set a 15 minutes assessment session to talk about your company’s language training needs.
