Top skills/People skills

[John Heisenberg]

From my little experience I believe the top skills most people need for any job are:

• Communication skills: listening, speaking, and writing
• Domain Knowledge or technical skills
• Research skills: drawing upon multiple streams of information to provide solutions to problems

What therefore is the benefit of people skills/interpersonal skills a lot of companies look for? I understand that you would not want to work with someone who is rude but I feel like this requirement is nothing more than away to hire on the basis of personality.

 

[Ken Abbott]

John Heisenberg: Everything you do, everywhere - now and for the rest of your career - will depend not just on your ability to convey information, but also on your ability to build consensus and get cooperation. Everyone with whom you work will be optimizing their own personal objective functions, but nobody (or few people) work alone. Some of the smartest people I know are ineffective because they can't martial the resources they need to carry out their ideas.

 

[pplstuff]

To add to Ken's post. There are positions of POWER and positions of INFLUENCE. A manager with a position of power can use this to order/command subordinates to reach a goal. A manager who is in a position of influence may not have a team or enough resources on his/her side to reach the goal. Instead, this manager must influence other teams to get the job he/she wants done. This sort of leader must have the people/interpersonal skills to convince others that the job he needs done is more important to the job they're currently working on.