Monday 4 February 2013

“Acquire Smart Skills to Stand out as a Smart Leader” - Professor M.S.Rao



“A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.” - Roy H. Williams


In one of my recent soft skills training programs I explained about soft and hard skills to my participants where soft skills are the way one communicates with others in a pleasing and polite manner and hard skills are the technical skills, domain competency and the knowledge one possesses.  I also explained that soft skills are the skills and abilities associated with personality, attitude and behavior. It is about the effective presentation of hard skills.  All professionals need both soft and hard skills to succeed at the workplace. One of the participants asked me what we should call when we mix both hard and soft skills. I found the question very interesting. Then I replied him that the proportional and judicious mix of both hard and soft skills is known as smart skills.

Smart skills are the blend of both hard and soft power, hard and soft skills, technical and business acumen.  Flexibility and adaptability are the key components of smart skills.  And we can define smart leadership as the process of setting goals, influencing people, building effective teams, motivating people, and, finally, aligning their energies and efforts towards organizational goals and objectives through soft and hard skills; soft and hard power and technical and business acumen.

The smart leaders are situational leaders who adopt both transactional and transformational leadership; blend both efficiency and effectiveness; believe in both hard and smart work; and do right things.  Leaders like Jeff Immelt of General Electric, Michael Dell of Dell Computers, and Steve Jobs of Apple Computers fall in the category of smart leadership.  Hence, smart leaders are essential to walk the talk and to achieve the desired outcomes successfully by blending both people-orientation and task-orientation.

Currently Gen Y appreciates working in flat organizations and in collegial model of behavior where they don’t want to work under demanding bosses but prefer to work with the leaders who can handhold and guide them at the workplace.  Hence, being good at smart skills helps immensely at the workplace for both superiors and subordinates, and adopting smart leadership helps greatly for the leaders to get the tasks executed effectively in order to accomplish the organizational goals and objectives. To conclude, acquire smart skills to stand out as a smart leader.


"Leadership is the ability to establish standards and manage a creative climate where people are self-motivated toward the mastery of long term constructive goals, in a participatory environment of mutual respect, compatible with personal values." — Mike Vance





Life is great!

Listed in Marquis Who's Who in the World in 2013
Professor M.S.Rao Born for the Students



Thanks for reading!

Kindly share your thoughts and comments below, I’m sure someone out there will find your story useful.



Copyright©2012 MSR Leadership Consultants India. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

This is an educational blog for free sharing of knowledge, not for commercial use. Please don't cut articles from my blog and redistribute by email or post to the web. The use of this material is free provided copyright is acknowledged and reference or link is made to the Blog http://professormsrao.blogspot.com  This material may not be sold, or published in any form, or used in the provision of business services to a third party without permission.

No comments:

Post a Comment