The Soft Skills Needed to Climb the Corporate Ladder

Getting from the ground floor to a corner office too often seems like a collection of industry skills. Learn finance, how to sell, run an office, hire smart, cut loose what doesn’t work. And, these days, there’s all the knowledge of artificial intelligence, bid data, and the resulting analytics that promise to deliver ever better profits.

Talk to an expert in moving up, though — a long-time executive recruiter like William Vanderbloemen, founder and CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group and author of Be the Unicorn: 12 Data-Driven Habits that Separate the Best Leaders From the Rest — and you’ll hear about not the technical skills but the soft, human ones that make all the difference.

“Relationships are going to drive jobs in the future as STEM degree jobs get replaced by AI,” Vanderbloemen bluntly tells GlobeSt.com. “People ruminate on what makes a successful employee, but that’s like a lot of op-ed pieces that sound like cliches.”

Instead of guessing, Vanderbloemen looks to the 30,000 in-depth interviews with leading candidates for specific executive positions that he and his company have done since 2008. That was the “data” part which boiled down to specific abilities that gave people the edge. “We found they all had twelve skills that were teachable. In the current and prior economies we’ve been through, you had to deal with people who were good at their jobs but unpleasant to be around.”

Vanderbloemen doesn’t say that technical skills are unnecessary. However, with AI likely to take over an increasing amount of those activities, people looking to advance their careers need ways to make themselves irreplaceable. “The only thing left for humans to do is better human-to-human skills,” he says.

These human-to-human skills seem simple, but they are deeper and subtler. Like what he calls speed, which is really time-sensitive responsiveness. “People who get back to other people quickly and with intention stand back from the crowd,” Vanderbloemen says. Cookie-cutter approaches — depending on automated responses — aren’t adequate because they lack authentic human context, a trait of respect. Who wants to feel like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield and his trademark, “I don’t get no respect?”

Another soft skill, and a rare one, is self-awareness. “Out of 250,000 interviews with ‘normal’ [non-unicorn] people, 93% said they were above average,” Vanderbloemen explains. It’s clearly impossible. True self-awareness means knowing how you react to situations and being honest about your abilities. “When you’re self-aware, you’re not going to put yourself in danger or set yourself up for failure,” he wrote in his book. “When you’re vulnerable and humble, you’re opening yourself up to the possibility that maybe you don’t have it all figured out.” The fastest path to self-awareness, he notes, is to “trust others to tell you your blind spots.”

Another critical soft skill is also self-directed, in having a “north star” that is a driven purpose. Some are motivated by money, to be the best, or to decide to leave the world better than how they found it. “The higher the north star, the farther the individual goes,” Vanderbloemen says. “The more noble your north star, the farther you go.”

There are nine other traits, including being authentic, admitting mistakes or when you are struggling; the agility and ability to adapt to changes and new circumstances; choosing to find solutions to problems; anticipating what might happen and planning accordingly; being regularly prepared; remaining constantly curious; creating and maintaining connections with other people; and working on being likeable and productive.

A couple of points to consider. One is that these traits aren’t automatically inborn in people, otherwise a discussion of them wouldn’t matter. All of these are things to develop. Another is that developing these strengths and traits takes time. It won’t happen in a day, week, month, or maybe a year or longer. Think of these skills as something to build throughout a career and to continue to develop and deepen.