Top 5 Soft Skills of Highly Successful People

In recent years, much business and leadership education has focused on the quantitative or "hard" skills necessary to be an effective manager or professional. Although the importance of technical skills like financial management cannot be understated, effective management also requires "soft," or qualitative, characteristics that cannot be easily measured. 

While there are literally dozens of soft skills that comprise a great manager/professional, communication, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making and negotiation are some of the most important qualities.

In this course you learn about the top 5 soft skills you need to be really successful in any career you choose to pursue.

Communication Skills: 

Being able to communicate effectively is the most important of all life skills.

Communication is simply the act of transferring information from one place to another. It may be vocally (using voice), written (using printed or digital media such as books, magazines, websites or emails), visually (using logos, maps, charts or graphs) or non-verbally (using body language, gestures and the tone and pitch of voice).

How well this information can be transmitted and received is a measure of how good our communication skills are.

Problem Solving Skills: 

Problems are at the centre of what many people do at work every day. Whether you're solving a problem for a client (internal or external), supporting those who are solving problems, or discovering new problems to solve, the problems you face can be large or small, simple or complex, and easy or difficult.

A fundamental part of every manager's role is finding ways to solve them. So, being a confident problem solver is really important to your success.

Critical Thinking Skills:

Critical thinking is that mode of thinking — about any subject, content, or problem — in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skilfully analysing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. It presupposes assent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use. It entails effective communication and problem-solving abilities, as well as a commitment to overcome our native egocentrism and socio-centrism.

Negotiation Skills:

Negotiation Skills are required to negotiate superior deals in both your business and personal life. Negotiating Skills include methods of: communicating, persuading and influencing, planning, strategizing, employing tactics, techniques, tool-sets, systems & processes, and often teamwork.

Decision Making Skills:

In psychology, decision-making is viewed as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several alternative possibilities. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.

Decision-making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker.

This course will give practical ways on how to develop each of the key soft skills above.