3 Skills that Make You Indispensable
It takes more than three skills to succeed, but there are three that will make you pretty important in any organization.
COMMUNICATION
From Moneyball: “If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages."
Effectively communicating throughout your organization is a vital building block that can lead to great success. If you get in the habit of listening and asking questions to make sure you accurately understand the issues you will be more aware of what you need to do and what you do not need to do. Good communicators "seek first to understand, then to be understood." But let’s not get lost in the Stephen Covey quote. Take it for granted that it is always your responsibility to understand and be understood. It takes a bad communicator to decide that someone else is a ‘bad communicator.’
COLLABORATION
From Moneyball: “Stop solving the same problems the same way.”
Good communication skills are essential for collaboration. Collaborators network, coordinate, and they cooperate — which all can be defined as different levels of resource sharing, but they also want to make each other stronger by participating to share risks and rewards. Collaboration leads to innovation, and that’s an organization’s lifeblood. The good collaborators end up managing the important projects, and they bring out the best in everyone on the team.
CRITICAL THINKING
From Moneyball: "There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening."
These days there’s a lot of data to sort through. Like Nate Silver said, you need to be someone who can separate the signal from the noise. Intellectually curious people that have good critical reasoning skills can peel the noise away and figure out what’s really going on. Intellectually curious people have hungry minds. Their minds are in the habit of learning with an intensity that rivals an addiction - like someone might be addicted to eating too much fast food, drinking too much, or smoking. They consistently feel a desire to invest time and energy into learning more about a person, place, thing or concept. This drive is what makes them unique.
If you have these three skills well-honed, you’ll not only leave your mark personally, but you’ll also find that your organization will depend on you for its continued success and growth.
What are your thoughts? What kind of people are the most indispensible in your organization? What makes them so important? Was there a time when their initiative really came out and changed the future?
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