The Top 3 Professional Skills to Cultivate and Hire For

After years of leadership coaching and vetting potential candidates for clients’ (and my own) companies - these are the top skills I’ve learned to prioritize in both my own professional development and when interviewing others:

#1 - Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence, or EQ, is my top indicator of both professional success and personal satisfaction, for two key reasons:

1. The level to which you are able to identify and regulate your own emotions determines the level to which you are able to access your Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), and therefore every Executive Function (decision-making, social-relational ability, impulse control, effective communication, future projection ability, creative thinking, problem-solving - basically all the things you need to participate effectively in any part of being a human being); and

2. The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships, and how connected and psychologically safe you feel.

If I or someone on my team is not operating with Emotional Intelligence, we’re at risk of using up our bandwidth navigating unintentionally-provoked threat states before we even GET to the actual work.

#2 - Critical Thinking

The Oxford Dictionary defines critical thinking as, “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.”. First of all, you have to have Emotional Intelligence (and regulation) in order to objectively analyze and evaluate anything. Secondly, the most effective professionals don’t just see individual questions or problems; they see the patterns - the relationships and connective tissue between the questions and problems.

Progress occurs much more rapidly when individuals and teams identify and address issues in systems and processes, rather than individual, seemingly discrete issues. In other words, critical thinking helps us notice and resolve the disease, not the individual symptoms.

Finally, critical thinking is a matter of judgement. Can I trust myself or my colleague/report/supervisor if we are not challenging assumptions, acknowledging and working to avoid cognitive/learned biases, considering all the evidence (instead of only that which supports our pre-existing perspective), noticing and working to avoid stigmas, endemic power imbalances, and generally allowing factual context to inform our perceptions, decisions, and expectations of self and others? My answer is a firm “no.”

#3 - Communication Skills

You’ll notice that you trace pretty much every important personal or professional skill back to Emotional Intelligence. Communication Skills are no exception. Without excellent communication skills, you (and your team) are going to waste a LOT of time in simply getting and staying on the same page - again, wasting bandwidth that could be applied to actually doing the work (or doing it at a much higher level).

Communication skills include:

• Writing - in my experience, the ability to write is a good indication of the ability to organize one’s thinking. This means understanding what information to present, in what order, using what tone, targeting what audience, in order to accomplish a goal or drive a desired next action.

• Speaking - language is incredibly powerful. Are you conscious of and intentional about the words you choose to use with others?

• Presenting/Persuading - do you have the ability to identify what matters to your target audience, and to present information in way that is both relevant to their interests, delivers value, and drives your desired outcome?

• Active Listening - I absolutely CANNOT understate the importance of active listening - of being present and engaged to the extent that you are (a) actually hearing what is being communicated, instead of simply waiting for your turn to talk, and (b) able to hear both what is and IS NOT being said? Are you receiving others’ signals, or getting confused, distracted, or dysregulated by what you’re perceiving as their noise?

• Reading Comprehension - this is another underrated communication skill. I cannot tell you how many meetings and/or long, drawn-out email threads could have been avoided had the person receiving the original email simply (a) carefully read the entire thing, and (b) responded directly to every question or concern being communicated.

Feeling pretty good about the top three? Check out the full top 10 list, below!

Top 10 Professional Skills to Develop
(and hire for/cultivate on my team)

1. Emotional Intelligence

2. Critical Thinking

3. Communication Skills

4. CURIOSITY

5. Self-Motivation, and a strong personal work ethic - I’m looking for folks who measure the quality of their work against the high expectations they have of themselves.

6. The ability to manage expectations, set boundaries, and ask for help

7. Creative thinking and problem-solving, scrappiness, and the willingness to experiment

8. Adaptability, flexibility, and change resilience

9. Values that prioritize fairness, ethical engagement, and treating themselves and others with respect, integrity, dignity, and kindness. It’s hard out there. Let’s not make it harder.

10. Last, but absolutely not least - accountability, responsibility, reliability, and consideration for how your decisions impact others.

What resonates? Have you identified any growth areas? Let me know in the comments!