The Secret to Career Success — Use Your Superpowers

Have you ever wondered why two people with the same credentials, similar experience have significantly different career trajectories? Interestingly, it comes down to their superpowers. High performers have mastered the technical skills needed for the job and have the right set of power skills to unlock their full potential. Top performers in a given role share a standard set of 20 or so power skills. Three to five of these power skills discriminate the top performers from good performers. We refer to them as your superpowers.

Basics of Soft Skills

Soft skills get little respect, but they can make or break your career.” — Peggy Klaus

These skills are an essential element of your talent stack and have a significant impact on how effectively you perform assigned tasks and duties. Soft skills include things like judgment, initiative, interpersonal skills, teamwork, and flexibility. They include an ability to communicate verbally and in writing effectively.

A Career Builder study of over 2,000 HR professionals found:

• 77 percent of the people believed that soft skills are just as necessary as technical (hard) skills
• 16 percent thought that soft skills are more important than technical skills

“Soft Skills” is A Misnomer

The essential elements of the modern talent stack include critical thinking, persuasive writing, communications, and teamwork. A better term for soft skills is “power skills.” Philip Hanlon, President of Dartmouth College, is an avid advocate for the use of the word power over soft.

Even in the most technical fields, power skills are so vital to innovation and business success. So why are they so often overlooked?

Today’s Workplace Requires Your Superpowers

Some of today's most lucrative industries, such as data science, were invented less than ten years ago. Many workers are improving their technical skills. However, a broader transformation is happening in the workplace. Workers and leaders will need to have a hybrid skill set of hard skills and power skills to achieve career success. Employers will look at your entire talent stack— knowledge, wisdom, power skills, accomplishments, and technical skills.

Our best-fit staffing process is designed for employers to fill this void.

Most individuals are unaware of the power skills that will make them successful in their role. Furthermore, they do not know which of their power skills are strengths and those that may be challenges that they need to manage.

Advances in technology, automation, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and big data are revolutionizing every field. Thus, the required refreshing of skills occurs at such an accelerated rate that traditional educational programs cannot keep up. Furthermore, jobs are becoming hybridized and need a mix of different skill sets.

Almost 30% of job seekers have left a job within the first 90 days of starting.” — Jobvite Survey(2018)

As an individual, our career assessment provides you with insights regarding your power skills and shows how they align with high performers in your current or any prospective role you may be considering. Your technical acumen and accomplishments will get you the interview. However, your power skills will get you the job. The insight we supply positions you to ace the problematic interview question — “tell me about your strengths and weaknesses.”

Value of Liberal Arts Degree

I'm going to make a prediction, in 10 years, a liberal arts degree in philosophy will be worth more than a traditional programming degree." — Mark Cuban (2017).

Cuban reasons a degree that teaches how to think in a big picture way and better collaborate will become more valuable as AI and automation will transform the job market. To stay competitive, he recommends abandoning degrees that teach specific skills or professions and opting for degrees that motivate you to think in a big picture way, like philosophy.

Cuban is trying to address a vast skills mismatch based on the current outlook for our economy and workforce. However, it is short-sighted — you need both technical and power skills.

At StartUp Canada, W. Brett Wilson talked about the importance of teaching marketing, entrepreneurship and philanthropy beginning in elementary schools and continuing into all higher learning, either academic or in the trades.

1. Teaching Marketing — Your resume is your primary marketing document — get your message across on the first page, the rest of it is irrelevant; in business, your primary marketing document is your business plan. When people come to Wilson and say, ‘I’ve got $1,000 to start a business, what should I do with it?’ he says, ‘go back to school and study marketing’!
2. Teaching Entrepreneurship — Learning to put your ideas to work will serve you well in every job. A successful entrepreneur needs skills in innovation, business planning, risk-taking and to name a few. With these skills along with self-confidence, institution and a lot of hard work becoming your own boss are possible. It allows you the freedom and independence to use your ideas. As an entrepreneur, your time and energy can be spent creatively by putting these ideas to work for you and the future success of your business.
3. Teaching Philanthropy — Anyone can make an impact on, or in, the world comes down to offering their time, money, or leadership. You do not need millions to give back, volunteering your time and wisdom will help make the world a better place

Wilson makes a persuasive argument that these areas should be part of core schooling – a course, he suggests, in changing the world.  He said, “These core subjects will develop students’ leadership skills. Moreover, if we are going to drive innovation and productivity, it’s as important to fill the bus with leaders as it to have leaders driving the bus.”

Mr. Wilson graduated in engineering and worked for three years in the oilfields of Western Canada. After graduating with an MBA in entrepreneurship and began working as an investment banker. Wilson co-founded two investment banking advisory firms.

We need to develop our students as whole people, being able to work across disciplines and across sectors.  That’s how we are going to make great citizens.” — Elizabeth Cannon, P.Eng., President, University of Calgary

Multipotentialites

Emilie Wapnick defines a multipotentialite as someone with many interests and creative pursuits. It is a mouthful to say — other terms that connote the same idea, such as polymath, the Renaissance person. I consider myself a multipotentialite. Looking at their diverse business interests, I think Mr. Cuban and Mr. Wilson as multipotentialites, too.

To develop a complete mind: Study the art of science; study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else” – Leonardo DaVinci

Leonardo da Vinci was born in a small town called Vinci in the Republic of Florence on April 15, 1452. He was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. During the Renaissance period, it was considered ideal to be well-versed in multiple disciplines.

An engineering degree is precious. However, the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature, and psychology supplies a significant benefit in design. Here are a few examples:

• an engineer who has only worked in technology is less likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want more than a psychologist
• a history major who has studied events like the rise and fall of the Roman Empire or the Enlightenment gains insights into the importance of its usability and the human elements of technology
• a musician or artist may be vital in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine

There are some tremendous strengths to be a multipotentialite. Here are our superpowers:

• Idea synthesis—combining two or more fields and creating something new at the intersection. Innovation happens at the intersections. Moreover, multipotentialites, with many backgrounds, can access a lot of these points of intersection.
• Rapid learning—when we become interested in something, we want to read everything we can find on the subject. We are serial beginners. So, we are less afraid of trying new things and stepping out of our comfort zones. What is more, many skills are transferable across disciplines, and we bring everything we have learned to every new area we pursue, so we rarely starting from nothing.
• Adaptability— able to morph into whatever you need to be in each situation.

As a society, we have a personal stake in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now. Moreover, we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them. No one is an expert in every field. Solving our complex and wicked problems need a community of diverse thinkers that would include a multipotentialite and domain specialists. With this connectivity, we can realize the wholeness. Only by understanding the wholeness of a thing, can go beyond and use it with its real potential.

Data Show the Value of Power Skills

An internal study at Google looked across teams to determine the most innovative and productive units within the company. They found that their best groups were not the ones full of top engineers. They discovered that their highest performing teams were interdisciplinary groups. These groups benefited heavily from employees who brought strong power skills to the collaborative process. The critical predictors of success within Google are excellent communication, insights about others, and empathetic leadership. However, all companies that are finding value in these skills.

People see teamwork and collaboration as the most helpful power skills in the workplace, followed by critical thinking, public speaking, and persuasive writing.

The Value of Power Skills

It is a challenge to gain power skills in today’s fast-paced corporate environment. Formal education does not typically teach power skills as a hybrid skillset with other “hard” abilities. Students discover that they are on one segmented pathway or another. For instance, computer science disciplines that tend to focus solely on programming and hard skills; or liberal arts curricula that foster critical thinking and creativity, however, often leave graduates with non-linear career-paths.

For remarkable results, I advocate combining engineering, liberal arts, and the humanities. This approach is not well received by many of my engineering colleagues, who favour a more specialized/expert education. We need great engineers who are subject matter experts. However, embracing both those who go deep and those who go broad is good for society.

Education or Training?

In the 20^th Century, if you want an education get an arts degree, everything else is training.”

Back then, college was a place where adolescents went to explore courses and majors before settling on a job and career, often well after graduating.

In the 21^st Century, if you want an education get an engineering degree, everything else is training.”

The remarkable thing about an engineering background is that it teaches you how to learn.  It is complicated, and it needs new knowledge and an investment of time in learning the materials. One of the beautiful things about it was learning how to learn, which then enables you to take on almost anything.

High school students increasingly see college as a means to an end: getting a job. In the past decade, surveys about the choice’s teenagers make about their college majors reveal that higher education has become less about preparing for life or learning something that interests undergraduates and much more about securing employment. Now 80% of college students change their majors.

About two-thirds of 14- to 23-year-old students want a degree to provide financial security according to a Harris poll. They rank it primarily when it comes to their motivation for going to college. Also, fewer students are majoring in the humanities. More students are enrolling in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs. They think their employment prospects will increase with a STEM degree.

Unemployment among new college graduates is at historic lows. However, underemployment is not. Some 43 percent of college graduates are underemployed, meaning they are in jobs that did not need a bachelor’s degree. Many folks talk about a “skills gap,” however, it is a skills mismatch. Here is some insight into the emerging trends you need to know about talent and skills mismatches. The result is that only 30 percent of people like their jobs.

Combined with the misconception that new employees will naturally pick up power skills, this has led to a general overemphasis on STEM-related concentrations. I am a massive advocate of STEAM — we need to get the Arts in STEM. We now realize that this is not necessarily effective. However, some people still question: can technical people develop these power skills?

Learning Power Skills

The benefits of soft skills training can be hard to measure, but new research reveals that it can bring a substantial return on investment to employers while also benefiting employees.”— MIT Sloan

A study from MIT Sloan found that power skills training can improve work productivity in every area of an organization, including factory settings. The controlled, twelve-month trial at five Bangalore factories revealed that training in problem-solving, decision-making and communication yielded a 250 percent ROI in eight months. Other success factors included faster turnaround on complex tasks, an overall boost in worker productivity, as well as improvement in employee attendance.

Industry data and top business leaders all point to one thing: power skills are essential. They must be embraced and developed. The next generation of leaders, executives, workers and need to be able to balance hard skills, like programming and analytics, with “power skills.”

Progress

Google and others have discovered the value of power skills just from looking within their companies. However, it will take two fundamental changes in the mindset to help workers at large achieve this hybrid skill set:

• recognize the value that strong power skills bring to the team
• invest in fostering this valuable skill set in employees

As a first step let us stop using the word “soft” and champion the word “power.” With this mindset, we can get there and think holistically about talent stacks.

Build Your Unique Talent Stack

I describe management as arts, crafts, and science. It is a practice that draws on arts, craft and science and there is a lot of craft - meaning experience - there is a certain amount of craft meaning insight, creativity and vision, and there is the use of science, technique or analysis.” — Henry Mintzberg

Your talent stack is your career capital. Students should be encouraged to study an area where they have superpowers rather than a false idea of what they need to succeed. Students need to find their pathway to career success and satisfaction by leveraging their superpowers. Learning broad skills is the key to a satisfying long-term productive career. Your unique talent stack helps you thrive in a changing world. To find your superpowers you need to look at your behavioural DNA. Are you going to be a specialist or a multipotentialite? Our assessment tools will help you discover your power skills and let you know those roles where your power skills align with those of high performers.  You can then focus on learning the technical skills needed for the position.

Your power skills may lead you to go to engineering, social science, the humanities, or the arts. These strengths will contribute to making you not just workforce ready but world ready. Career satisfaction is a journey of discovery. When you know your internal wiring, you no longer see yourself as different, you will see yourself as being unique. Enjoy your ride!