Seeds for Success – Social Skills that Make a Difference

Whether you're starting your career or simply a new job, it’s important to bring something new to the table. This may go beyond technical skillsets and include things like personal involvement in projects or company culture, for example. We made a list of some of the social skills that could help you start off in the right direction.

Adaptability

Humans are naturally resistant to change. However, nothing ever stays the same for too long and change is something we shouldn’t shy away from in the modern workplace. It’s something that should be embraced!

Old habits die hard. But staying set in your ways doesn’t help in advancing in your career and might actually hold you back from solving problems faster and more effectively for your organisation. It all comes down to responding to the demands of a situation and adapting the solutions we come up with to resolve issues.

This kind of dynamism shows your commitment to the organisation and will influence your professional growth for the better. It’s a sure-fire way to prove you’re willing to go the extra mile and become an even better professional.

Teamwork

For a business to be successful, people must work together to achieve a common goal. Quality of work tends to improve when people use their different strengths and skills in collaboration with one another. Team players are desirable because they’re more able to work together and provide a sense of union which makes any workplace more attractive, on top of greater productivity and effectiveness.

There are some common traits defining team players, which you can work on to improve this skill: being an active listener, choosing assertiveness over aggression, being empathic, giving and receiving constructive criticism, helping others, being self-aware, and sharing as much information and ideas as possible, to name but a few.

Work ethic

Work ethic is more than just being able to get out of bed in the morning – it’s being 100% determined and dedicated to your job. Having a strong work ethic is believing in the importance of your job and feeling that working hard is essential to success. There are several aspects that define a strong work ethic. Integrity, reliability, cooperation, and responsibility are just a few examples.

You have a strong work ethic if you’re reliable. Improve this by being on time for meetings and for work overall, meet deadlines for projects and tasks without compromising quality, be a great team player and co-operate with your colleagues. Integrity brings out the moral side of having a strong work ethic, as it means you’re honest, polite, and fair to others. All these points together ultimately give us a profound sense of responsibility, whether it’s regarding to the tasks in hand or a willingness to be held accountable for our own actions more generally.

Ingenuity

Every job has elements of problem-solving. This is where you’re expected to think of solutions to deal with a particular issue. Usually, top performers deal with difficult challenges because they have strong problem-solving skills that translate in great ingenuity when it comes to thinking outside the box to find solutions. This type of creative thinking can, and often does, lead to significant improvements within the company.

A few things to help improve your ingenuity and problem-solving skills are to sharpen up your creativity, determination, initiative, observation, perseverance, and analysing capabilities. The ability to identify complex problems and review them to find potential solutions can make you stand out from the crowd and boost your professional growth.

Ingenuity is important because everyone has decisions to make. Yes, even if you don’t hold a managerial position within the company, you are bound to need to make decisions within your role. Whether it’s to decide which task you should complete first or to come up with ways to help your manager resolve an issue, improving your ingenuity will put you miles ahead!

Curiosity

Last in our list, but just as important, is curiosity.

In an age when technology and information is readily available, it’s easy for us to access everything with only a few clicks or taps on a screen. In a way, this can put a brake on one’s curiosity because researching no longer poses as great a challenge as it once did.

However, nurturing our curiosity is still key to progressing your career. By staying curious, we’re willing to learn more and to improve our capabilities. We become more open to new ideas and new perspectives, which in turn means we become someone who is more approachable and open-minded. Furthermore, the more curious you are, the more likely you are to participate in programmes that will be useful to improve all the skills listed above, as well as other hard skills.

Feeding a curious mind isn’t as hard as it might sound. Grab a book or open your browser and start researching that one thing you thought about the other day that you still haven’t quite figured out. You might be surprised where your research will take you and you’ll probably end up learning more than you expected!

In the end…

It’s not about having these skills but rather it’s a case of using them to maximise your professional growth. These skills make you both more human and more prepared to face new challenges. They will help forge relationships, be open to adaption, and think big, enabling you to become a central part in your individual success as well as that of your organisation.

Ready to power up your skills? Take a look at our internship page and our job openings. Who knows, you may find something that fits you like a glove. We look forward to welcoming you aboard!