Skills You Need for Career Success

Going to school and getting your papers is not what career success is all about. These academic skills need to be coupled to soft skills. These are the skills that help you to positively interact with others and get your career to prosper in your career. Here are 7 essential skills that you need for career success.

1. 1. Emotional Intelligence You might be the best in the world at what you do, but if you alienate coworkers and rub your managers the wrong way, no one is going to want to work with you. That’s where your emotional intelligence quotient, or EQ, comes in. Understanding your colleagues and connecting emotionally with them will pay off enormously at work. You’ll easily get along with people at all levels of your organization and be prepared to finesse sticky situations. No matter how senior or junior you are, EQ can help you spot the right way to raise difficult issues, approach a prickly colleague and manage tough clients.
2. 2. Ownership You might not be the CEO of the company, but you’re the CEO of something — communications, invoicing or whatever you’re responsible for. Taking ownership of your work means assuming responsibility for helping the organization as a whole towards success.
3. 3. Staying Calm Calmness is one of those traits that doesn’t always get appreciated until it’s absent. Make a point of staying calm, rational and objective, even when you’re frustrated or angry Calmness also tends to go hand-in-hand with low drama; people who are calm tend not to indulge in unconstructive interpersonal conflict and generally operate with cooperation and good will toward their colleagues.
4. 4. Openness to Feedback Feedback plays a crucial role in helping you spot opportunities for that. But if you bristle and get defensive at suggestions of what you can do better, over time most people will stop giving you feedback at all. Openness to feedback means being eager to identify ways you could perform better and genuinely wanting to hear dissent.
5. 5. Polite Assertiveness While too much assertiveness can become domineering, polite assertiveness is simply about addressing problems calmly and forthrightly and not shying away from difficult or awkward conversations. It means speaking up when something isn’t going right, not being afraid to bring new ideas to the table and not stewing in silence when you’re bothered by something.
6. 6. Decency We all want to work with colleagues who handle disagreements civilly, give others the benefit of the doubt, respect opinions that differ from their own and act with genuine care for other people. And the higher up you go, the more decency stands out as a differentiator of great leaders.
7. 7. Integrity Integrity at work means speaking up if you make a mistake that reflects poorly on you (doing what you say you’re going to do, acknowledging when new information shows you were wrong and not being afraid to say “I don’t know.” When people know that your priority is to be honest and objective, you’ll find that your opinion will be taken more seriously, you’ll get the benefit of the doubt in he-said/she-said situations and, often, potentially contentious situations will go more smoothly.