“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!
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Professor M.S.Rao Born for the
Students
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