Transcript Soft Skills presentation

Make Yourself Indispensible
Expand Your
Personal Effectiveness,
Awareness and Impact
Presented by Sara Paul Raffel
Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker LLP
What does it mean to be
personally effective in this
context?
• Determine that there is a need for
training, pitching it, winning the
pitch, and effectively conducting the
training.
• What skills do we need for this?
“75% of long term job success
depends on soft skills while only
25% on technical knowledge”
-- Fortune 500 CEO Study conducted by
Stanford Research Institute & Carnegie
Mellon Foundation
Is this just touchy-feely nonsense?
• No!
• Soft skills encompass personal,
social, communication, and selfmanagement behaviors
• More then just "warm-and-fuzzy"
people skills
Categories of Soft Skills
• Managing yourself and your career
• Organizational savvy
• Communication skills
• Self promotion
• Dealing with differences
• Handling others
Managing Yourself & Your Career
• Self awareness
• Getting your job done
o
o
“Mission critical soft skills”
Time management, problem solving, attention
to detail, responsiveness, accuracy, etc.
• Attitude
• Decision making
• Risk taking
• Common sense
Organizational Savvy
• Office politics
• Organizational awareness
• Spreading your influence
• Deflecting gossip
• Having a mentor
Communication Skills
• Adjust your approach based on
context, person, subject, cues, etc
• Sharpen your listening skills
• Always be polite
• Be smart about asking questions
• Develop formal presentation skills
• Learn to handle tricky situations
Self Promotion
• Promoting yourself is not just for
your yearly performance review
• Always be ready with a “bragbite” or
“bragalogue”
• Keep up your visibility when you are
not face to face
• Don’t tolerate credit thieves
Dealing with Differences
• Learn to work with different types of
people
• generational, gender, race, national
origin, etc.
• Learn how key people like info
conveyed
• Don’t take things personally
• Be sensitive towards others
Handling Others
• You are always being judged!
• Handling criticism and critics
• Admitting when you have made a
mistake
• Leadership skills
• Management skills
• “Managing up”
Applying It
• Communicating with C-levels and
managing partners
• "Managing up“
• Not being intimidated
• If relationships are done right,
marketing takes care of itself.
• Put relationship building on the top
of your priority list.
Your Action Plan
• How will you generate training
opportunities?
o
o
The formal pitch
The fly by, the elevator speech, etc.
• Big decisions happen throughout the
year in thousands of small meetings
and conversations.
Conclusion
• Soft skills, like any other skills, can
be learned
• Further reading
• Questions?