Vanya Wryter Consulting Services

Tag: leadership skills

  • How to Develop an In-Demand Skill Set

    How to Develop an In-Demand Skill Set

    How pandemic-proof is your skill set? If a global event disrupts the economy, would you have a job tomorrow? Many people lost jobs last year, but those workers with high-demand skills were able to do one of three things.

    These workers kept their jobs, they were snapped up by a new company if they were laid off, or they pivoted with ease into a new industry. Those are the perks of an in-demand skill set. You’ll always be able to find work. To ensure the stability of your income, you’ll want to continuously improve on this in-demand skill set which should include the following skills.

    Speaking Skills

    Strong speaking skills are one of the top skills that will land you a job, improve your job performance, and advance your career.

    • At job interviews, you’ll be able to give concise, well worded, and confident answers.
    • Your elevator pitches will persuade your listener to believe in your cause or invest in your project.
    • When presenting an idea or your boss, co-worker, or client, you’ll deliver your concept in a persuasive and effective manner. The other party will either agree with you or respect you if they disagree.
    • Customers and clients will trust and understand your advice.
    • Your presentations at meetings will be well-organized and polished.

    Clarity and confidence are important on the job for people to understand you and believe what you say. To develop your speaking skills, work on the following:

    • Time and record yourself speaking about one topic for one to three minutes. Listen to the recording. Does your speech have a beginning, middle, and end? Do you speak smoothly, or fill your pauses with ums and uhs?
    • Practice giving a presentation to someone you feel comfortable with, such as friends or family.
    • Watch videos about public speaking and try to implement a tip into your speaking practice. For example, focus on the volume and pitch of your voice one day, and focus on your vocabulary use for an impromptu speech on another day.

    Sales Skills

    Here’s a fact you probably knew but may not have thought about: you need to be able to sell to be successful. Many people don’t know how to sell or are afraid to because of the slimy, desperate, dishonest salesperson image that we associate with selling. What you should know is that sales in every day practice is more subtle:

    • Selling your concept or idea to your boss at a meeting. Selling is persuading in this case, and if you can’t persuade, then you can’t get the other party to agree with you.
    • Selling your boss on a job promotion or getting a raise. Why should your boss give you that job title you want? Why should you get an increase in your salary? Again, if you aren’t persuasive, you won’t achieve what you’re looking for.
    • Selling to your customers and clients. The obvious result of a successful sale is if your client buys what you are selling. However, there are other levels of selling, such as getting the customer to trust you and build a long-term client relationship with you and your company.

    Sales is a skill that can developed over time. It’s a high-demand skill because every business needs sales to survive. To work on your sales skills, practice the following:

    • Read books and watch videos about sales tips and techniques. Understand the psychology behind why some sales techniques are effective.
    • Practice selling something to someone you feel comfortable with. As you gain confidence, work on selling something to a stranger. For example, convince someone you don’t know to try visit a place you like.

    Writing Skills

    Writing is an important skill for communication and professionalism. Your mastery of this skill increases in importance if your work involves a high level of accuracy and/or or political correctness.

    • Writing emails that have few grammar, spelling or punctuation errors reflects on your level of education and professionalism. If you make a lot of mistakes with words like they’re/their/and there, your writing can look sloppy.
    • Verbal communication is easy these days with voice messaging apps, but writing is important for keeping records. A letter or email saying that you will have something done by a certain date is a solid promise of what you will do. In some cases, written records can become evidence if there is a lawsuit.
    • Written reports and other documents are a permanent record that will be referenced in the future. Your choice of words and the clarity of your thoughts will be vital to the professionalism and accuracy of the document.

    Writing skills need a lot of practice and time to develop because you need to learn grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. You can also try these activities:

    • Copy a piece of writing that is written in the style that you want to learn. By copying it as practice, your brain starts to learn that writing style.
    • Practice writing each day. Use writing apps such as Grammarly to review and give suggestions on how to improve your writing.

    Leadership Skills

    Career advancement is difficult without leadership skills. Empathy and understanding the people you work with, and being clear and organized about when you want something done are both in-demand skills.

    • At most companies, a promotion means becoming a leader of some kind, which means you need leadership skills. You need accountability and responsibility to lead a team, become a supervisor, or become a manager. It’s rare that an employee will receive multiple promotions for a job in which they work solo. Leadership skills can be learned from on-the-job training or taking a course.
    • As an owner of your own business, even for a sole proprietorship, you still need to know leadership skills to manage your employees or contractors.

    Technological Savvy

    Ongoing mastery of technology is key.  Software is constantly upgrading to new versions and companies require their staff to learn new programs and platforms over time.

    • Larger organizations have replaced processes with technology to simplify the work of employees. For example, paper-based time sheets have been replaced by computerized time sheets to make the calculations easier for the accounting department.
    • Companies with employees or clients in other cities or countries are using technology instead of in-person meetings. For example, the technology for a Zoom meeting is less expensive than flying people and booking hotel stays.
    • While it’s still possible to call someone on the phone, or walk over to another person’s desk on the same floor, communications applications make it easier to share files and messages between office workers and locations. Members of one chat can see what actions have been completed by various team members involved in the same project.

    Fortunately, it’s easy to find videos on YouTube on how to use all the latest platforms and software. If your co-worker or your company IT department hasn’t answered your tech question, you can educate yourself on whatever technology you are using.

    Summary

    If you aren’t sure how to develop an in-demand skill set, start by looking for skills that are transferrable from one industry or niche to another. In times of economic hardship, these skills will continue to find you steady work. Strong speaking and writing skills, and sales and leadership skills are just some of the skills that are always in high demand. Can you think of any other transferrable, high-demand skills? Comment below!

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  • Leadership and Race: Are Leadership Skills Affected By Our Identity?

    Leadership and Race: Are Leadership Skills Affected By Our Identity?

    Can we teach leadership skills without considering race and ethnicity? For a long time, I thought leadership was a skill that everyone could learn. But when I wanted to cite an example of a well-known female Asian business leader as an example for this article, I couldn’t think of a single name. I realized I had made an important discovery and after a little more digging, I found an alarming pattern.

    The more research I did, the more I realized leadership in business and one’s chances of earning an executive level position were in fact strongly affected by one’s ethnic background. Asians in the United States, for example, held many professional positions but few top-level leadership positions.

    When I looked at my own personal experiences with race, it was clear that race and ethnicity determined how people perceive you. If that were the case, how could we teach leadership skills so that all races and ethnicities would have a fair shot at executive positions?

    Can Asians Ever Be Canadian?

    Asians born in Canada or born in the US (or any nation that isn’t considered an Asian country) are familiar with the following inquisition when they try to explain to people that they are Canadian (or American or something other than Asian).

    I’ve always considered myself to be Canadian. As for role models, I choose them from any ethnic background, although I prefer successful female businesswomen, so that I could aspire to become like them.

    I have quite a few women role models: teachers I admire, bosses that inspired me, and favourite authors. But out of all them, none were Asian. When I looked at my business mentors, the situation was also grim.

    My two business mentors are highly successful millionaires or near millionaires and both are Chinese. They are examples of how immigrants could come to Canada, work hard, and become financially successful. They were leaders that I could follow but they were men.

    The successful women leaders that I could think of were the wives of these men. They hadn’t created their financial success on their own, but they learned leadership skills to help their husbands in their careers.

    I decided to look past my own experience and see if I could find more successful Asian leaders in North America. First, I wanted to establish what qualities I wanted to see in a strong leader.

    What Leadership Skills Should We Teach Managers And Executives?

    When you think of leaders that you admire, what qualities do they have? Are they good listeners? Do they show empathy? Do they inspire you to work hard to attain their level of success?

    The leaders I admire are very good at taking charge, providing direction for the team, and being someone you can depend upon. At the same time, even though they are the leader, or the boss, I never feel like they are demanding me to complete a task. They ask me in such a way that I feel that I’m doing them a favour. A favour that I’m not likely to refuse, of course, because it’s a request from a supervisor.

    Do Asians have the leadership qualities that I’ve identified?

    Maybe they do. And maybe they don’t. The American workforce either lacks Asians that have what it takes to be an effective leader, or they aren’t seen as having the qualities needed for leadership. A closer look at numbers reveals a gloomy situation.

    How High Is the Bamboo (Glass) Ceiling for Leadership?

    A 2010 study cited by Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that “Asians do outperform other minorities and white people when it comes to education, employment, and income.” If they are so successful, then shouldn’t they also successfully climb the corporate ladder as well?  

    Apparently, they don’t have far to climb before they bump into the glass ceiling. HBR used the term “bamboo ceiling” – the equivalent to the glass ceiling. In addition to the 2010 report, it cited a 2015 report on diversity.

    It found that, “Asians represent only 1.5% of corporate officer positions in the Fortune 500, according to 2012 data.” The situation for Asian women was worse because these women represented only 3.1% of executives five tech companies in a study, while Asian men represented 13.5%.

    What could be creating these limitations?

    All races face stereotyping at the workplace. Employment data cited above suggests that Asians are highly competent at finding high paying jobs. Their success may make them appear threatening in the workplace. However, Asians are also perceived to have a critical weakness.

    The HBR article study observed that “stereotypes about Asians lacking social skills make them seem unfit for leadership.”

    An article in Bloomberg suggests that Asian culture encourages communication and networking styles that go against the “mainstream dynamic of assertiveness and directness.” For this reason, Asian Americans are considered as fitting for “low- to mid-level management positions, but not top-level leadership.”

    How Many Asians Are In Executive Positions?

    A Silicon Valley report found that Asians were so underrepresented in leadership positions that they were grouped into other, larger categories. In the report, “Asian men are lumped into a ‘non-underrepresented’ category with white men” while “Asian women are assigned to a category that includes women of all races.”

    These types of numbers were repeated in other industries, where Asians continued to be underrepresented in the executive ranks of companies. See the table below.

    What can be done to increase the number of Asians in top level executive jobs? Could their social skills truly be so lacking that they would be unsuitable leaders? Or would it be possible to teach leadership skills in such a way to compensate for disadvantages from any cultural differences?

    Future of Leadership Skills

    It would be interesting to see the data for other races and ethnicities. What is the ratio of their ethnic group in jobs in an industry, compared to the percentage in executive positions for that industry?

    If a wide gap exists between the lower ranks and the executive ranks, what can be done to level the playing field in leadership?

    From these studies in this article alone, it seems that perception of cultural differences affect how people from different races are promoted to leadership positions.

    In future, one recommendation would be to design leadership training skills that address stereotyping and culture. It’s possible to have talented and skilled leaders equally represented from all ethnic backgrounds.

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