Category: management skills

How do you talk about yourself? Would you describe yourself, for example, as “good at maths”, “a natural athlete”, or “honest”? A lot of people think that these traits are a fixed part of your personality and an intrinsic part of your identity that can’t be changed. These thoughts are the product of a ‘fixed mindset’, according to acclaimed Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

A person with a growth mindset is far more likely to embrace new information and challenges, see effort as necessary, be inspired by other’s success and learn from criticism, but leaders must consider that it’s almost impossible to adopt this mindset across your team if there is no foundation of trust.

Building trust in a team translates to more energy, less stress, fewer sick days and less burnout – all crucial elements when it comes to forming a healthy, efficient and stable team who are willing and able to adopt a growth mentality. Leaders who know they can trust those around them and that they can trust you in return enable everyone to enjoy the freedom to try new things, innovate and create new ways of approaching problems.

Chemical reactions

Our emotions and behaviours change when we build trust with the people around us; it literally affects our brain chemistry and it is up to leaders to adopt strategies that build this type of culture, if a business truly wants to be resilient and attract the best talent in the industry.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. There are biological reasons as to why we act the way we do when we trust another person or group of people and it all comes down to oxytocin, otherwise known as the trust chemical. However, when we experience negative stress, we produce the cortisol hormone that elicits a fight, flight or freeze response. When we are stressed, we have no need to be trusting.

While the workplace hopefully doesn’t pose that level of threat, a toxic culture, rife with negative stress leads to the same cortisol response, inhibiting oxytocin and leading us to be on high alert and less likely to trust.

Ultimately, it will protect a company’s bottom line if its people are in an environment where they can thrive. One of the biggest challenges facing business today is the oncoming tsunami of stress and burnout that we will see in the coming years because people look set to be returning to the hamster wheel, post-pandemic.  

The workforce of today isn’t going to stay in a role for 20 or 30 years, so the organisations that are more adaptable to the latest needs and ideas are the ones that are going to last and that will attract the brightest and best new talent. Without the best people, you’ve lose a competitive advantage, so working to address issues with trust and mindset now is not only a good move for your people, but one that is also vitally important to your bank manager, board and investors.

Encouraging a growth mindset

Productivity and resilience are the product of a workplace culture based on trust and a growth mindset. So, what can leader start doing today to encourage these behaviours within their team?

Invest in positive relationships: According to neuroscientist Paul Zak, having a caring habit and cognitive empathy is your best bet for increasing oxytocin and building trust. If you do nothing else, work on your active listening as a starting point for relationships that will help both you and your team to thrive.

Be present: Get rid of distractions – don’t text or send emails while you are having a conversation. Look your colleague in the eye and listen with an intent to understand, rather than an intent to respond right away. Ask questions that show you are interested in what they are saying and pay attention to non-verbal cues, such as them looking excited about a project or nervous about what they are about to tell you.

Empower your team: When people feel safe and supported, empowering them leads to great things. Show your team that you trust them to do the big things and explain to them that while you will always have their back, they have shown you that they are more than capable of managing this piece of work on their own.

Ultimately, we need to commit to building environments that celebrate when we succeed, but that also give team members the space to be honest with leaders when they are struggling, or something hasn’t gone to plan.

A manga-style graphic novel series for covering business and self-development has been launched by the research and education publisher Wiley.

The six Manga For Success books cover a range of topics as the following titles indicate: Managing Change; Marketing; Resilience, Confidence and Positive Thinking; The Psychology of Personal Growth and Better Relationships; Business Problem-Solving and Strategy; and Leading Meetings and Teams.

‘Manga’ is the highly illustrated, emotionally compelling Japanese graphic novel format that has captivated millions of English-language readers around the world.

Originally published in Japanese by the JMA Management Center (JMAM), a leading Japanese publisher of business-oriented manga books, the Manga For Success series aims to combine highly visual manga stories with sophisticated explanations of the most important principles and concepts. They are primarily targeting younger career professionals looking for a fun way to learn the basics.

In Toshinori Iwai’s The Psychology of Personal Growth and Better Relationships, for example, a 28-year-old area manager of a retail chain meets the ghost of psychologist Alfred Adler, who gives her various advice and strategies for transforming the way she interacts with store managers and her supervisor. The result is a huge improvement in her communication skills and the birth of new relationships of trust that allows her career to move forward smoothly.

Widening reach and decoding complex topics

As with some other existing English-language manga titles from other publishers, these books are also structured to match the Western way of reading – i.e. from left to right across the page. Manuscripts were also carefully reviewed to make any necessary cultural adaptations to ensure the stories resonate with a Western audience in the same way they would the original Japanese audience.

Sales of manga books in the UK are now thought to worth more than £25million in the UK and more than $250million in the US, according to Neilsen BookScan Data 2021/22 and 2021 figures from the Anime News Network, respectively. With its coverage of business and management, this series is aiming to widen the format’s reach by appealing not only to existing manga fiction fans, but also new non-manga readers and people who just want an enjoyable, different and emotionally compelling way to learn about important topics and develop their skills.

The overriding aim is also that Manga For Success can make what are often considered intimidating topics easy and fun to understand. The format is highly approachable and is designed to help readers get a grasp on difficult concepts quickly from the detailed explanation of core concepts in each story. All six titles publish in print and eBook formats in April 2023.

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” Henry Ford.

At the start of a fresh year, your thoughts may have turned to the learning you can achieve in 2023. Whether that’s learning a new skill for a hobby, or to further your career. In the past, learning may have centred on a technical, digital, or ‘hard’ skill – a new language, code, or tool, for instance. But times are changing and I want to draw your attention to power skills. These describe skills that can be transferred from role to role, project to project; skills that give you the power to shape your career and build a more responsive and agile workforce.

Business-critical skills

Power skills are becoming more critical as businesses grapple with ever-changing markets and emerging technologies. For individuals, cultivating your power skills can give you broader career options both inside your current organisation and externally.

That’s why power skills regularly rank in the top 10 skills being developed and searched for on upskilling platform, Degreed. The top 10 skills for November 2022, for instance were:

1. Leadership
2. Data analytics
3. Change management
4. Project management
5. Machine learning
6. Design thinking
7. Microsoft Excel
8. Problem solving
9. Agile development
10. Entrepreneurship

Seven out of the 10 skills on this list would count as power skills (and conversely, you could also argue that a skill like using Microsoft Excel and being able to do data analysis also carry across multiple roles and departments).

The importance of learning agility

I would add an additional skill to this list, that is learned while you’re upskilling in these (and other) skills. It’s called ‘learning agility’ and it describes a mindset and habit towards learning that means you are continuously learning and able to adapt to change. This skill is vital in today’s economy, because the half-life of skills is around five years and dropping fast. In the future, you’ll be expected to grow new skills at an increasingly rapid pace. What you use and know today will be out of date in just a handful of years.

How to build power skills

There are a range of ways to build power skills and many of them are outside traditional, classroom-based learning. For good reason, you cannot learn something like ‘leadership’ effectively if you’re dictated its theory by a glassy-eye professor at the front of a class.

The best way to learn a power skill is through hitting it at different angles. There are many different learning opportunities that forward-thinking organisations are offering their people including peer learning, academies, experiential learning (on-the-job opportunities) and online learning pathways.

Practising a power skill

Combining theory with practice will enable you to learn the basics about a power skill first and then stretch that skill through practical implementation. My colleague, Degreed’s chief learning and talent officer, Kelly Palmer, has a brilliant example of this from her time as CLO at LinkedIn. Her team created a peer-learning programme called Conscious Business that focused on building power skills.  

One of those skills was the ability to have difficult conversations. In the peer-based environment of the programme, colleagues were able to bring examples of difficult conversations they had recently had and learn from each other. One participant, John, had an example where a teammate, Mark, had missed some deadlines. During the conversation, Mark became defensive and John left it feeling awkward and with little progress made. Sharing this with the peer-learning group allowed John to find new solutions based on similar experiences from his peers, and the entire group learned techniques on how to better handle difficult conversations.

Measuring your power skills

For business leaders, another important aspect to building power skills in your organisation is to measure them effectively. Unlike hard skills that can be easily measured with an assessment or credential, power skills are slightly more nuanced. I would recommend that business leaders broaden the way they measure someone’s skills, based on any stretch assignments, academies, or peer-learning programmes that they have completed. Alongside this, peer and manager feedback, as well as self-ratings, can add more insights into someone’s skill level.

For individuals, I would suggest collecting evidence of you building and practicing a particular power skill. Make a note of any practical experiences you have, including stretch assignments, temporary redeployments to another team, side gigs, volunteering, mentoring and peer learning (and teaching others). Additionally, curate any theoretical learning into a skills profile, including any books you’ve read, podcasts or videos, online courses, blogs and articles. This gives you leverage when going for a career move internally or communicating your skills during the recruitment process.

Evolving alongside careers

Learning is no longer contained to the classroom nor your early years. It will be your partner, evolving alongside your career. That’s what makes power skills worth focusing your efforts on, as they give you more longevity and resilience when compared to a technical skill that will expire in a couple of years.