The Human Skills Every Leader Needs To Be The Best They Can

While M.B.A. programs teach our future leaders about hard skills like quantifiable abilities and competencies, this creates a homogenous set of experiences, making interacting with them often alien. One M.B.A. graduate and a successful corporate person told me, “I was constantly told to ‘focus on the people,’ but I was measured on numbers. Incentives and how people are assessed need to be aligned.”

The soft skills are mostly left for the M.B.A. students to grapple with themselves once they are on the job. They quickly face that life is full of interpersonal and intrapersonal challenges without soft skills.

The lack of fluency in soft skills makes it hard to lead and empower others, let alone yourself. Soft and hard skills go hand in hand. Your hard skills are almost useless when your soft skills are lacking.

I consider the so-called soft skills anything but, and I would like to rename them  ‘Power skills.’ I have also referred to the integration of soft skills + hard skills as ‘Human skills.’

While hard skills focus primarily on intellectual intelligence (IQ), soft skills integrate all the dimensions of being human — intellectual intelligence (IQ), emotional intelligence (EQ), body intelligence (BQ), and spiritual intelligence (SQ) – so we can be informed and guided not only by the mind, but through our heart wisdom, body wisdom, and our connection to spirit.

The times we live in call for more than being a bright mind and being able to analyze data. The times call for leaders with strong character, integrity, and ethics, kind and caring leaders who transcend their own needs and work for the collective.

This kind of leadership is where we tap into all of the dimensions of our intelligence. It is often talked about as leading from the inside out. It can have the most significant impact on our organizations and all our people.

Not to mention that leaders connected to all the dimensions have cultivated an inner life. This is done by, among other things, asking age-old questions such as “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” The famous purpose or WHY question.

What are you doing to cultivate all the dimensions of your intelligence? How do you foster inward leadership as much as outward?