5 Essential Qualities For A Successful Career
Your career is an integral part of your life because you spend the most part of your waking hours working to earn a living. Just as it is crucial to do what you love in order to enjoy your career, having the necessary sills to perform the work is also critical to achieve success in your career line. The other component that can help enjoy long lasting success in your job is to have the soft skills needed to work along with others and enhance your productivity. Soft skills are your personal attributes or characters that enable you to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people in your organization. They include such qualities as good communication, team spirit, curiosity, and ability to exert influence in the organization.
Having the right experience and qualifications will help you land the job, possessing the core soft skills will take you further ahead of your peers and help you have a fulfilling career life. Your experience and qualification tell the employer what you can do, they are your hard skills and it expresses your intelligence quotient based on the assigned tasks. Your soft skills on the other hand is all about attitude and personality, it expresses your emotional intelligence. During job hunt, your I.Q will help get you in to the company, but your E.Q will help sustain and help you grow in the company.
Here are my top 5 essential qualities needed for a successful career:
1. Curious Mind:Having a curious mind will help you to learn as much as possible about the organization, and you will be able to also contribute that knowledge for the success of the company. With a curious mind, you will be able to take initiative without waiting for your boss to tell you what to do, come up with creative solutions to organizational challenges. Creativity enables you to experiment with different ideas without being afraid of making mistakes, it empowers you to question certain assumptions and ways of doing things and propose better ideas that can potentially become a quicker or less costly means of executing tasks.
2. Good Communication skills:You must be an effective communicator in order to collaborate with others to achieve organizational objectives. Communication in this case can be verbal, non-verbal or written type, but you need to know how to pass across your message, rally round your team towards a common goal. Good communication involves explaining, persuading, motivating, and providing plans for executing tasks. For written communication, don’t hit “send” immediately after composing an email. Take time to reread and make edits if necessary to ensure that your message is clear, concise, and it will convey the right intentions.
A good communicator must also be an active listener. You must be effective at listening to others, knowing what they want, so that you can effectively articulate your response to their requests and eliminate noise or communication gaps in your messaging. Having the skills to decode and deliver ideas and information so that the message recipients can easily understand and act is critical as you advance to roles with greater responsibility and visibility in your organization.
3. Influencing Skills:Your ability to influence people and lead change in your organization is very crucial for your success in your line of career. In most organization, you work in teams and most of the time you may need others to perform certain tasks in order to advance the organizational objectives. Your ability to work with them, influence or persuade them to work on those activities is essential as you deliver results within the organization. You need to have the necessary leadership skills that will help you to make them accept your ideas and bring people together to execute on the idea. It is about being able to sell your vision and plans and get people to believe that what you are telling them is the best and right way to move the organization forward.
4. Courage & Confidence:Everything begins with confidence, and confidence is essential to driving solutions for your organization. If you have confidence, it will be easier for others to believe and listen to you as you work with other employees in your company. Confidence involve knowing your areas of strength and weaknesses, and it can help to inspire trust and build confidence in your ability to lead. Along with confidence, having the necessary courage to make decision and follow through on your decision is essential for a successful career. The fear of making the wrong and making a mistake has kept many people from coming forward with their opinions in an organization. Courageous people are different, they understand that mistakes provides learning opportunity and it helps to develop them to make better decision next time around. Confidence and Courage are great soft skills to have if you want to be successful in your career.
5. Results-driven:You are employed in the organization to get stuffs done. There will be no benefits to having all the right peoples’ skills if you are unable to convert it to results that will help achieve the organizational objectives. You must know how to challenge yourself to deliver results, influence others within and outside your organization to execute so that measurable results. To deliver results, you must be a team player, always looking out and contributing to the success of your team. If your team is successful, chances are, that you will also achieve success as an individual.
Closing Thoughts:
To achieve success in your career, you must be able to develop both the hard and soft skills required to get your job done, be able to collaborate and work effectively with your team, so that everyone is working harmoniously towards achieve organizational objectives.
