5 Soft Skills for Leadership

A recent article in CIO magazine outlined five soft skills that every leader should develop:

• Financial management
• Critical thinking and analytical skills
• Marketing and communication
• Innovation and collaboration
• Leadership

Financial Management

For most techies, there are very few things more boring than a financial statement. But money is power, and people who understand it are more effective.

Develop the skills needed to understand what your organization's financial goals are, and how priorities are selected to support those goals. Some of this will be from learning how to read and understand reports, but the most important piece is to take an interest in your organization's financial life.

Critical Thinking

Learn how to identify the quality of data and how to see whether the data support the conclusions that are being drawn. This means that you have to approach what you are told with a critical eye, and devote the energy to think about whether the information matches reality, and whether the conclusions are correct.

Why are things done the way they are? How could they be better? What information can you collect to support (or debunk) those conclusions? All of these are aspects of critical thinking that you need to practice.

Marketing

What techie doesn't make fun of marketers? Scott Adams' comics are replete with gags about marketers that have more than a little truth to them. But they have something to teach us.

Effective managers learn how to communicate and sell their ideas. If you can't bring other people along with you, your results will be limited, no matter how good your ideas are.

Innovation and Collaboration

We like technology. So why is it that IT professionals are so bad at applying it to our own organizations? Develop tools and practices that will promote collaboration and multiply the effects of everyone's efforts.

Leadership

Becoming the person that other people want to follow is the essence of leadership. Think about the people you want to follow, and identify the characteristics they have that appeal to you. Be fair to your employees and teammates, and be generous when there is credit to go around. When things go wrong, take the positive tack and look at what was done to fix it and what is being done to prevent the same problem from coming back.