Here are five essential skills that can make a business leader stand out
The formative period of a leader’s career is pivotal in sculpting her professional identity and trajectory. This phase, often fraught with challenges and uncertainty, marks the transition from academic shelter to the real-world arena, demanding self-sufficiency and strategic acumen. Here are five essential skills that can provide a competitive edge to emerging leaders at this critical juncture.
The first of which is reading books. Ironically, most youngsters stop reading as soon as they graduate, partly because our education system is oriented more towards the passing of exams than absorption of knowledge. However, reading is possibly the most powerful force multiplier for a budding leader.
The ability to consume knowledge at a high rate accelerates mental and professional maturity, and that ever-increasing knowledge base enables better opportunity spotting, inter-disciplinary dot connections and superior decision-shaping. While ‘reading’ online news, editorials and long-format articles is good, that’s incomparable to reading books that cover the subject with far more depth and nuance than an opinion piece, which by definition can only be the opinion of an individual and not the complete picture. One of the best investments young leaders can make is to master speed-reading as a skill, and more importantly implement the discipline of reading every single day.
Reading also forms the bedrock of the second essential skill, which is the ability to write well. As American historian David McCullough pointed out, “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly and that is why it is so hard." Stringing some sentences together is not writing well.
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