Heather's Article Leading People: The perfect storm, was featured in the SMPS The Marketer Magazine.
Take a peek below!
A perfect storm is defined as multiple forces uniquely coming together to create an unusually powerful impact.
In the A/E/C industry, there has been a common practice of promoting people into leadership based on their technical skills and expertise, not because they have the foundational power skills (formerly known as soft skills) for leading people. I’m not suggesting that technical skills are unimportant, but rather that using them as the sole determinant for promoting individuals into people leadership is one of the forces that is making leadership, and our overall workplaces, more challenging.
According to Alexandra Levit, a workforce futurist and author of Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future (Kogan Page, 2018), soft skills give people “career durability”. It helps them to be successful over the long term. According to Harvard Business Review (see “What Makes a Leader, January 2004), “[Emotional intelligence] accounts for nearly 90 percent of what moves people up the ladder when IQ and technical skills are roughly similar.” Read the rest of the article here.