Member-only story
10 Skills That Matter Most at Work
Skills that can set you apart and drive your career forward.
Your skills at work matter — not only the core skills that justify your designation, but also the ones that help you connect, collaborate, navigate challenges, solve complex problems and most importantly enable you to do impactful work.
While the more skills you have, the better placed you’re to get more responsibilities, more autonomy and more trust from others, not all skills are equally valued and trying to excel in everything will prevent you from being good at skills that actually matter.
These skills can’t be assigned to you as tasks by your manager or improved by simply reading books. You need to practice them, gather feedback, adapt and keep applying them until they turn into a habit.
“Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”
― Charles Duhigg
Once you have these skills as tools in your toolkit, you’ll not only stand out, be recognized and appreciated at work, but bigger responsibilities, better opportunities and more challenging work will land your way. You’ll gain confidence, trust and respect from higher-ups to build better products and lead initiatives that can have a huge impact on the entire organization.
Here are the 10 things that matter most at work:
High agency
Many things can go wrong at work — conflicting priorities, unknown problems, uncertainty of decisions, misalignment of expectations, communication gaps, unrealistic deadlines and so on.
Adopting a victim mentality in such cases prevents you from thinking clearly, finding solutions and moving forward. Assuming others are the source of your problem prevents you from taking responsibility and feeling in control of your outcomes.
Difficult situations come with many unknowns and challenges. Navigating them requires becoming a high agency person.
High agency is about finding a way to get what you want, without waiting for the conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming the…
