- Soft skills, such as persuasively selling one's ideas, motivating others, and setting organizational vision, become more important. These are often directly opposed to the functional skills that helped a manager to be successful earlier in their career.
- Latent skills, often things that a leader finds distasteful or unpleasant, become liabilities. These latent skills might include dealing with public speaking, conflict, or organizational politics.
It is essential for a leader to develop personal, authentic strategies to address these two important areas. I will look at each of them in turn on this blog.
I am definitely noticing the importance, and challenge of these, in my career. The functional skills (in my case, engineering) that got got me into my current managerial position are becoming less and less important and I am having to learn the soft and latent skills you describe. Just when I had the engineering side figured out and was comfortable in my position, now I have these skills to master as well - looking forward to reading more about how to develop them...
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