The Importance of Soft skills in Corporate Life

In the fast changing world that we live in today, soft skills play a pivotal role in generating personal and professional success. No doubt, technical expertise is very important in every job but if you lack in soft skills, you will find it very difficult to climb up the corporate ladder.

The competitive and fast pace nature of our world presents us with very less time to make a lasting impact and generate success. So, communication skills have come to acquire a critical status. Also, we have tight deadlines on our plates that need us to be an expert at multi-tasking and delegating. We all need to understand, that we are all very unique and different and we need to value differences and be effective and efficient team players. All these skills contribute in personal and professional skills.

You need to connect emotionally, be empathetic, and understand others and their paradigms. You should know when to be assertive and when to be submissive; what this means is that we need to be more emotionally intelligent to succeed in life.

Someone rightly said “life is not about accumulation…life is about contribution”. By using niceties, you can make emotional deposits in the hearts and minds of your friends and colleagues, thus increasing and improving your network and your connections.
Simple words like “Sorry” and “Thank You” make a big difference. People might forget what you said to them or about them but they will not forget how you treated them, so it becomes very important to be nice to others , no matter what their status or position. Real leaders lead from the front and know that to succeed one needs to make others succeed as well.

Some years ago, the Times of India decided to supplement the small “i”  for the capital “I” symbolizing a less egoistic, less selfish approach. This is what we need to do in our lives as well. When you help others you are helping yourself too. Inclusiveness can make your life rich and worthwhile.

More than all using soft skills make you feel good about yourself and make others feel good about you as well. So, imbibe these soft skills and make yours and others lives rich and fruitful.

By:

Siddharth Anand

Faculty, INLEAD

Top 5 Management Lessons to learn from Narendra Modi

Source-www.archive.financialexpress.com

Crisp personality, clear vision, exceptional orator and enthusiastic nature, this is Narendra Modi, the 14th Prime Minister of the largest democracy on this planet, India, best described for you. And, 26th May, 2014 was the historic day that this charismatic leader took oath as the first Indian Prime Minister born after Independence, in a first of a kind oath taking ceremony attended by who’s who of Politics, Bollywood, Sports and the Indian Corporate Industry.

Winning a total of 282 seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Narendra Modi proved that their win wasn’t just a fluke or anti-incumbency vote against the Congress.  So, what changed for BJP from the 2009 general elections to the one held in 2014? The answer is, Narendra Modi.

Here are the top 5 management lessons that one can learn from the “ultimate manager” as he is jokingly called by his opposition.  

1) Clarity of thoughts- This is the first and the foremost quality that a manager should possess. Until and unless you’re clear about why you’re in the race, you can’t win it. This is where Narendra Modi scored against his contemporaries.  From the very beginning, NaMo was very clear that his aim was to fix his place at 7, Race Course Road and this is what he confidently projected to others. Seeing his confidence in himself, gave the public the confidence that NaMo has it what it takes to run a country like India and they gave him a whole hearted mandate.

Source- www.deccanchronicle.com

2) Set smaller targets in order to achieve that big target- Mr. Modi’s journey to the top job was an amalgamation of small strategic steps taken one at a time. He very carefully set small, small targets for himself and achieved them at his own self-defined pace.  He started with Gujarat and then slowly, slowly penetrated to the heart of the nation (remember the famous 2013 SRCC speech?).  Hence, in order to achieve that one big target in mind, you need to first set several smaller targets and achieve them one by one.


3) Find the right team- "A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle."  Mr. Modi understood this well. He knew that in order to reach the top, he will have to make his foundation strong.  Starting from Amit Shah to BS Yeddyurappa, he made sure that the people whom he trusted and believed in were in and the people (Sanjay Joshi, Jaswant Singh) whom he didn’t were out.

4) Be the Change you want to see- With initiatives like Make in India, Swacch Bharat and Jan Dhan Yojana etc., Mr. Modi proved that he isn’t just words.  Being the Prime Minister of the country didn’t stop him from picking up a broom in his hands and cleaning the sides of a littered street. He showed the public and his contemporaries how it is done and also how cleaning your own country is not a matter of shame. One needs to give him credit for turning a thing like cleaning streets with a broom in your hand into a thing of social status. Another marvelous use of social media by the Social Media genius.

Source-www.economictimes.indiatimes.com

5) Know your weaknesses and never play to them – No human being is perfect and the person who understands this thing is the closest one can come to being perfect. Taking lesson from his 2013 India Today Conclave debacle where he lost his cool for a few seconds following questions regarding the 2002 Godhra Rights, Mr. Modi has made sure that he never repeats his this mistake ever gain. He knew that media being an essential tool to connect with the public, he can’t afford to neglect this medium completely. So, he turned to rallies, social media and conceptualized Mann ki Baat (a monthly All India Radio broadcast) to overcome his this weakness.