Power Skills: Taking Your Team from Proficient to Spectacular!

By Beth Porter, Four Corners Broadcasting
There’s a new term in the C-suite (or in the one-man shop!): Power Skills. Previously referred to as “soft skills,” Power Skills encompass emotional intelligence and people management skills versus “hard skills,” like technical prowess or scientific knowledge. Many of them are the skills your parents and teachers tried to drill into you:

• Adaptability and resilience
• Consistency
• Courtesy
• Emotional intelligence
• Problem-solving
• Positive attitude
• Responsibility
• Teamwork
• Time management

On a great day, it’s easy to embody all of these characteristics. As a leader, you must learn how to embrace them in times of crisis or frustration. While there’s an old dogma that the boss can throw a temper tantrum or read someone the riot act, that doesn’t work in today’s environment. And while power skills are essential for building and maintaining an excellent workforce, they are also crucial to engaging with other stakeholders, including customers, vendors, investors and the general public.

It’s easy to dismiss these skills as personality traits…you’re born with them or you’re not. However, power skills can be developed. These skills help leaders develop the highest potential in their workforce by exercising empathy and empowerment, fostering curiosity, learning how to delegate and how to build a solid team.

Adaptability and resilience
Business is moving at a faster pace than ever and pivoting seems to be a daily occurrence. Adaptability is a skill that allows you to adjust to new situations, new circumstances. Resilience is a skill that allows you to overcome difficulties and quickly recover from setbacks.
Building Adaptability:

• Assign new tasks or projects that may be outside of an employee’s wheelhouse. Be mindful of not overwhelming the person, but exposure to new things can encourage confidence and enhance adaptability.
• Foster the use of and openness to constructive criticism. Being open to feedback helps keep lines of communication open and becomes a tool to improve performance.
• Encourage the team to reframe their thinking to identify and overcome any mental blocks or prejudices that can block team cohesiveness and adaptability. New perspectives can spur innovation and connection
• Develop problem-solving capabilities. There are several good step-by-step guides. If it works, make it a team building game! At the minimum, review the situation to identifying the problem. Determine what caused the problem. Identify as many solutions as you can. Use filters like technical viability, resources and risks to discard solutions that aren’t feasible and to identify the one that is the best overall course of action.

Building Resilience:

• Be optimistic. This means focusing on the positive in any situation. Optimism will help keep maintain the determination and ability to keep moving forward. Have you lost a big client? This could be your opportunity to focus team efforts to develop those non-traditional accounts you’ve been wanting to recruit.
• Plan and organize work flow. Free your team from the mental strain of having to remember their to-do lists. A large white board that outlines projects, objectives and timelines helps everyone determine their tasks for the month, the week and for the day. With a well-organized work flow, it’s easier to prioritize and restructure a few hours or days when an unexpected crisis pops up.
• Improve team relationships. By consciously building connections between colleagues, and ensuring everyone understands what skills and strengths each individual provides, as well as what weaknesses there are, project tasks can be assigned to the people best suited to carry them out. And what to avoid assigning…for instance, don’t look to the wall flower to deliver the investor presentation!  
• See challenges as opportunities, not disasters. This is the time to get the team into brain-storming mode rather than amplifying a “The sky is falling” lament. Define the situation. What is working and what isn’t? Where are the areas to improve or to discard? Ask for input from different opinions and different perspectives.
• Endorse a healthy lifestyle for your employees. This can be as simple as offering a gym membership or it can be more comprehensive. For instance, offer a rebate for or arrange an onsite flu vaccine clinic. Investigate rebates or incentives for health insurance. Encourage healthier eating by providing healthy snacks or lunches for team meetings.  

Over the course of the next few months, I’ll be looking at these power skills in more depth and hopefully offer some step-by-step guides to develop your own power skills and ways to develop them among your team.
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Looking for an immersive experience in leadership development or to develop leadership skills for a team member? Consider Leadership La Plata, an excellent local resource. Check out www.LeadershipLaPlata.org for more information.

Beth Porter is the Senior Marketing Consultant with Four Corners Broadcasting and an alumni of Leadership La Plata Class of 2015-2016.