EQ skills
The key thing about EQ skills is that these can be learned, whether that’s about becoming a calmer, more confident or more creative person. Even the army, the ultimate command and control organisation, is taking proactive steps to help soldiers deal with the more emotional sides of their job, around resilience and stress for example.
What are you passionate about?
We all know what a meaningful career looks like. It’s highly-paid, well-respected, high-profile, intellectually stimulating and emotionally rewarding. The unfortunate thing is that for most of us, that’s not our career. The key, I believe, is for people to take time to reflect on the things that make them most passionate and help them to feel fulfilled. The next step is to find, or to shape a career that touches on those things as often as possible
The heart of job satisfaction
Having a meaningful career is not necessarily a conscious sense of being ‘happy’ while you’re at work. The key to meaning is a feeling that you are contributing to something worthwhile greater than yourself, that at the end of the working day you have left the world ever so slightly better than it was at the beginning. This seems a small concern but it lies at the heart of job satisfaction.
Business leaders have a responsibility to help employees find meaning in their careers. It is not just a social obligation – it makes clear commercial sense. Employees who are genuinely fulfilled and find meaning in their work are far more productive and effective. Leaders who offer opportunities to do this will find great people knocking at their door.
In the year ahead, I predict that more employers will begin to see the clear link between long-term profitability and developing services, products and workplaces that help consumers and staff find genuine meaning in their lives. While they can easily be overlooked in times of budget cuts, I expect so called ‘soft skills’ to become viewed as critical to working life, whether as a freelance or to navigate life in a large corporate.