It was a busy spring season for keynote speaking for me and I was especially happy to be able to introduce a new topic to audiences, The Super Seven: the Soft Skills Leaders Need in a Tough World. 

The crux of it is this: as an economist I am only too aware of the challenges that organizations face at the moment.  The business cycle is at a difficult point, with arguments to be made for lower interest rates but the reality that inflation might force them higher anyway. AI might present an opportunity, but even if you buy into the idea that AI will revitalize your organization, you need to come up with the money to invest in it and the expertise to restructure to take best advantage of it.   Business as usual is over in a world where cybersecurity events, climate issues, pandemics and geopolitics are continuously disrupting our reality.

So why am I, an economist with expertise in demographics and the future of work, talking about soft skills? The answer is that I have come to believe that the organizations that will have the edge over the coming years as the ones where these skills proliferate. I boil it down into a list of seven (‘the Super Seven’) including resilience, creativity, empathy, motivation and self-awareness, service orientation and teaching and mentoring that I think most important and I like to challenge audiences to think about how and why they could change their business outcomes. I have had an amazing response to the keynote so far with one leaders saying that it gives them a lot to think about when it comes to how they manage and lead.

Are you interested in developing leadership that acknowledges hard truths but uses soft skills to move ahead? Reach out and let’s talk about tailoring a presentation for your conference or goup.