Presentation 1 of 2: Powering Up Your Leadership Skills
Abstract: Find out what soft skills are in demand, why they are in demand, and how to power up your leadership skills. Make the commitment to spend some quality time with yourself to become, or continue becoming, a great leader. Great leaders create great cultures, which yields great work.
For a long time, soft skills ran a distant second to the hard, technical skills at time of hire and even promotion to managerial roles. That is changing fast. Soft skills are now of equal importance in employment decisions. Soft skills are predicted to surpass technical skills in importance early in this decade. In fact, soft skills are becoming so important in organizations that they are being rebranded as “Power Skills”. It’s no wonder. Power skills provide protection against your role being automated through AI. Power skills support the delivery of technical expertise on teams; without them, the best technical people can’t contribute effectively. Power skills are central to effective leadership. And, because they are difficult to train in the work environment, employers want people who already have them.
PMI Talent Triangle: Leadership
Presentation 2 of 2: Why There’s Power in Soft Skills and What We Can Do About It – Davis
Abstract: The world of work is at an inflection point as a result of the evolution, no revolution, of automation generated by AI. It is estimated that nearly all routine, repetitive jobs — entire jobs — will be automated. And, project management professionals will not be exempt from this revolution. MdKinsey reports that over the next decade, 60% of jobs not previously automated will have as much as 30% of the repetitive, routine job elements within them automated. Data gathering and routine decision-making may also be automated. This AI revolution will accelerate the current trend of employers prioritizing soft skills as nearly equal in importance to technical skills, possibly surpassing them in importance soon.
Find out more about these trends, what soft skills are, why they matter, and what to do about getting more of them.
PMI Talent Triangle: Leadership
Biography: Jocelyn Davis is the president and co-founder of Nelson Hart LLC, a women-owned consulting firm. Nelson Hart works with clients in all sectors to help them develop teams and workplaces where individuals flourish and the organizations thrive.
Ms. Davis believes that each of us has unique strengths and capabilities to bring to our personal and professional lives as individuals and as members of various groups. Good leaders and managers invest the time to know themselves: their strengths and their lesser strengths, their interests and their passions. They also spend the time to know the strengths, lesser strengths, interests and passions of their direct report, their peers and their subordinates. Cultivating, inspiring, and deploying the unique capabilities of each individual is the key to organizational success.
Ms. Davis is also an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Clark School of Engineering, Project Management Program where she teaches two innovative applied positive psychology courses: Managing Project Teams and Evolving as a Leader. These courses incorporate the most recent research and practice from positive psychology, the science of how people flourish.
Jocelyn is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and practiced for many years as a certified public accountant with Ernst & Whinney, now Ernst & Young. She is a founding member of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology headquartered in the U.K. and of the International Positive Psychology Association in the U.S.
