Practical Genius (6 page)
Authors: Gina Amaro Rudan,Kevin Carroll
Now, for you to begin to decipher which are your leading hard assets, let’s begin to look at each area, beginning with skills. Skills are the functional abilities we use every day on the job and are basically what we’ve practiced over the years and come to do well. Consider your skills what you went to school to learn as well as what you have honed and sharpened (and been compensated for) over the course of your professional life. You weren’t born with your current skill set; you have spent most of your professional life working on your skills, and they are an obvious contributor to your bottom line.
The marketing guru Seth Godin once blogged that skills are either your domain knowledge or your process knowledge. Domain knowledge, for example, would be something like “playing the piano” or “writing copy about furniture.” Process knowledge refers to the “emotional intelligence skills you have about managing projects, visualizing success, persuading other people of your point of view or dealing with multiple priorities.”
When you think of your skills, are they predominately made up of domain knowledge or process knowledge related to emotional intelligence? Today emotional intelligence matters more than anything and can include people skills, leadership skills, communication skills, problem-solving skills, and analytical skills. Let’s look at each of these top five skills.
Many people argue that today, “people skills” are the most important skills one can possess. They include the ability to relate to, inspire, and mitigate conflict with your employees, coworkers, customers, and partners. These interpersonal skills basically reflect an aptitude for building and maintaining valuable relationships.
I have a friend who is renowned for her people skills. The people she works with call her “the glue” because she has such a knack for doing what’s necessary to make workplace relationships an asset, not a drag on the organization. Lots of people believe they have good people skills—“Sure, people like me!” they think. But when it comes down to it, there’s much more to it than likability. When you think of yourself in relation to others, do you see yourself as a good people reader, a fixer, or a facilitator? Or are you one of the ones who is brought along by the person with the people skills?
Though there is debate about whether leadership is an ability people are born with or is cultivated, these skills deal with your ability to manage teams to accomplish goals and to inspire initiative in others. Leadership skills also involve your ability to maintain a productive climate and to motivate, mobilize, and meet high performance standards.
When you read the word “leadership,” do you think of yourself as a leader, or do you immediately think of someone else? Some people demur from thinking of themselves as leaders, seeing the word
“leadership” as intimidating, cold, and arrogantly individualistic, when in fact it is a critically important function in any society. A leader has the capacity and confidence to draw others toward a desired conclusion. This quality has saved the day countless times through history and plays a crucial, often memorable role in human events. If you come by it naturally or it’s been cultivated in you over a lifetime, you know it. You’re the one saying “Let’s do it this way.” And the others do.
Communication skills are commonly considered to be the ability to listen, write, and speak effectively. I would further suggest that these skills include the ability to conceptualize and articulate concepts in a way that enables others to actualize them. The act of communicating involves verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal components. The verbal component refers to the content of your message. The nonverbal component refers to the message you send through your body language. And the paraverbal component refers to how you use your voice and tone in conveying messages.
Do you have a clear sense of how—and how well—you communicate with others? Does it come easily or naturally to you, or have you developed a confidence in your communications competence? Alternatively, are you happier to count on others to lead presentations, write reports, tell stories, explain the truth?
Whether you think of yourself as a have or a have-not when it comes to communication, it’s important to note that tapping your practical genius requires that you use those muscles. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Problem-solving skills include the ability to find solutions to problems using your reasoning and past experience along with available information and resources. This skill is demonstrated by a strong facility for generating workable solutions where others cannot. People who
are strong problem solvers are usually adaptable, tend to be able to visualize a problem and solution beforehand, and are great at creating “workarounds.”
Do you have the ability to see the warning signs for a problem, resulting in proactive attempts to avoid the problem or to adapt the approach? Do people tend to come to you to help them “figure stuff out”? Do people usually want you on their team because you’re such a productive player? Or do you find yourself more often doing the legwork of solving a problem rather than innovating the solution? This is one of the skills that’s easiest to map on one of those aptitude tests they used to give you as a kid.
Analytical skills deal with your ability to assess a situation, seek multiple perspectives, gather and process more information if necessary, and identify key issues that need to be addressed and resolved. The ability to identify, scrutinize, and streamline complex work processes is a function of this skill. The person with analytical skills sits somewhere between the leader and the problem solver in terms of the practical applicability of his or her skills on a project or in an organization.
If you have the strong ability to apply logical thinking to gathering and processing information, designing and testing solutions to problems, and formulating plans, you’re the analytical type. You are often asked to lead teams because of your ability to decipher, prioritize, and address challenges in order to meet the objective.
To me, these five skills (people, leadership, communication, problem solving, and analytical) are the most comprehensive, highest-level skills one can possess. Of course there are many others, often more specific but also often related to the five high-level skills. But thinking about your skills in these terms will help give shape to these assets in your mind.
PLAYBOOK
Sketch Your Skill Set
Have a look at the list below and see if any sound familiar to you—and
about
you. Try to tick off your high-level skills (in bold below) and/or your ten top more specific skills.
___ Administrative support
___ Administering programs
___ Advising people
___
Analytical skills
___ Assembling components
___ Attention to detail
___ Auditing
___ Bringing people together
___ Budgeting
___ Calculating
___ Checking for accuracy
___ Coaching people
___
Communication skills
___ Compiling data
___ Creating ideas
___ Customer service
___ Decision making
___ Delegation
___ Drawing plans and diagrams
___ Editing
___ Enforcing rules and policy
___ Evaluating performance
___ Financial management
___ Fundraising
___ Generating new business
___ Handling complaints
___ Interpreting information
___ Interpreting language
___ Inventing concepts
___ Implementing new policy and procedures
___
Leadership skills
___ Listening
___ Managing people
___ Manipulating numbers
___ Meeting deadlines
___ Motivating people
___ Negotiating
___ Organizing
___
People skills
___ Performing demonstrations or presentations
___ Persuading people
___ Planning meetings/events
___
Problem-solving skills
___ Promoting products or services
___ Public speaking
___ Reaching conclusions based on research
___ Recognizing problems
___ Relating to people
___ Research
___ Selling
___ Setting goals
___ Setting standards
___ Sorting data
___ Teamwork
___ Technology
___ Troubleshooting
___ Visualization
___ Working with regulations
___ Working with your hands
___ Writing
This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does get you thinking about the tools in your toolbox. By now you must have realized that great teams and organizations include members who together possess a whole range of these various necessary skills. Think of Mark Zuckerberg, his cofounders of Facebook, and the amazing team he now has to propel the company forward at the speed of light. That company represents the mother lode of skill sets—and I guarantee that a key handful of practical geniuses are among them!
Your strengths are the second major component of your hard assets. The path to excellence lies in our strengths, yet most people haven’t a clue what their strengths are. As the leadership expert Peter Drucker noted, “When asked to define their strengths, people often reply with skills or knowledge—the wrong answer. All great leadership begins with a deep understanding of one’s strengths and the strengths of those around them.”
According to the Gallup Organization Consultant and author Tom Rath, “Talent, described as your natural way of thinking, feeling or
behaving multiplied by investment, the time spent practicing, developing your skills and building your knowledge base is what defines a person’s strengths, ultimately defined as the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance.”
I tend to think of strengths as mostly adjectives, while skills tend to be nouns. This isn’t always true, but it’s a helpful way to think about them. Some of the strengths you might discover you have include:
Deliberative
, which exemplifies those who identify, manage, and ultimately try to reduce risk.
, a strength that is just what you’d think. You daydream about the future, imagine what could be, and are able to express a vision of the future that excites you and those around you.
, a skill that can’t be taught, a way of thinking that recognizes patterns where others see chaos. You are a chess player who can imagine the next six moves.
To begin to think about your strengths, take a moment to reflect on your past performance evaluations or 360-degree reviews. These traditional assessments typically measure what you’re good at and identify areas where you’re lacking. Think of the skills, abilities, and performance traits that most often are identified as strengths in these meetings. Make a short list of tasks and project areas in which you excel and basically hit it out of the park every time. Try to identify not just the tool (the skill) that enables you to do well but also the aspects of your nature that contribute to your success.