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Happy leadership. One popular business school course at a leading university is teaching the softer side of leadership, with the key tenet that happy leaders are effective ones. But happiness doesn’t just magically happen. Happiness, students learn, can be cultivated within yourself, and then you can cultivate it within your teams. And that’s especially important when workers are quitting their jobs at a rapid pace, with many organizations rethinking the nature of work with a focus on employee morale and happiness. [WSJ] |
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Wanted: soft skills. In today’s booming job market, the most in-demand skills are soft skills, according to a recent global report about the future of work. In our new hybrid world of remote and in-person work and amid a backdrop of historic resignation rates, hiring managers are eager to find candidates who are dependable, resilient, and good communicators. But more than half of employers interviewed—58%—reported that finding candidates with these, and other, soft skills has been their top hiring challenge throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. [CNBC] |
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What’s in a soft skill? A soft skill enables you to interact well with others. It’s nontechnical and typically falls into categories such as communication and negotiation, adaptability and learning, teaching and training, and interpersonal abilities, including empathy. For organizations, developing and rewarding soft skills is becoming all the more crucial in our ever-automated world. Machines are getting smarter, and as they take over more basic, repetitive, and even physical tasks, the need for workers with social, emotional, and technological skills will be higher than ever. |
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Hiring woes. While companies are keen to hire workers with soft skills, HR professionals are having difficulty finding them. Specifically, many candidates lack key skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, and the ability to deal with complexity. And the skills mismatch is largest in the most automated departments, such as IT and data analytics. Dive into the McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty—in which we quickly brief readers, and also offer links to deeper dives—on soft skills, and why they matter more than ever in a hard world. |
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| — Edited by Justine Jablonska |
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