15 Essential Soft Skills You Can Develop with Executive Coaching

When we talk about “soft skills”, we are talking about different skills or qualities that help us to perform better in the workplace. Although these skills may not be specific to our company or our roles as leaders, they are all very important skills that will help us to perform better within our leadership roles.

15 Essential Soft Skills You Can Develop with Executive Coaching 

There are many different soft skills that women in leadership need in order to be effective as leaders. Some of the main ones include: 

1. The ability to communicate effectively with the people within our teams. This means being able to communicate effectively with people both verbally and non-verbally (such as in writing), display active listening skills, and build positive working relationships with others.
2. Having good interpersonal skills. This means things like being able to have challenging conversations, develop relationships with others, show empathy, and recognise other people’s perspectives and points of view. This can also mean things like being able to influence, negotiate, and resolve conflicts.
3. Being emotionally intelligent. This means being self-aware (able to recognise and understand your own emotions) and having self-management (able to recognise and control your own emotions), social awareness (able to empathise with and recognise the emotions of others), and relationships management skills (being able to communicate and build and maintain positive relationships with others). This ties into the last two points on having good communication and interpersonal skills. 
4. Having good teamwork skills. This means being able to work alongside the other members of your team, collaborate, share ideas, and work together to achieve a shared vision or common goal.
5. Being motivated. As a leader, it is your duty to motivate your team and drive them towards achieving your shared goal or vision. This means that you need to be passionate about what you do and focused on achieving that goal or vision, so you can motivate and inspire your team to do the same.
6. Having good problem-solving skills. As a leader, there will be many times when you come up against some kind of challenge, setback, or obstacle. In these situations, you will need to be able to come up with creative yet practical solutions to overcome whatever obstacle is standing in your way.
7. Being able to act with integrity. This means behaving in an ethical and moral way, and always doing the right thing. By acting with the highest degree of integrity at all times, you will inspire the same values within other members of your team.
8. Being willing to learn. As a leader, you are not expected to “know it all”. Instead, the best leaders are those who are open to learning, hearing new ideas, trying new things, and learning from their mistakes. Remember, even the best leaders make mistakes – the key is that you learn from them!
9. Having good analytical and critical thinking skills. As a leader, you need to be able to analyse different possibilities and predict the likely outcomes. By having good analytical skills, you will be able to consider different options, predict the likely outcomes, and identify the best possible solution.
10. Being able to make good decisions. As a leader, you will always be in the position of having to make decisions on behalf of your team and your organisation. For this reason, it is important that you can make good decisions and are able to be decisive in making the right choices.
11. Having empathy for others. As a leader, it is important that you are able to relate to, understand, and recognise the emotions being felt by the other members of your team. This will help you to treat your team with kindness and compassion and make you more approachable and relatable as a leader.
12. Being confident. All of the best leaders are confident, assertive, and believe in themselves and what they do. As a leader, you need to be confident in your abilities and what you bring to your company or organisation. The other members of your team will be able to sense how confident you are in your abilities, so if you act as a confident leader, this will make them more confident in you as well.
13. Not being afraid to delegate. Many leaders feel pressured to take on too much themselves or find it difficult to avoid the temptation of taking everything on because they feel they have to. However, the most effective leaders are those who are not afraid to delegate non-core tasks to other members of their team, so they can focus more on tasks that require their personal expertise and attention. This helps them to maintain a better work-life balance that leaves more time for self-care and promotes their overall health and wellbeing.
14. Organisational skills. As a leader, it is your responsibility to lead your team, which also means delegating tasks, organising workloads, structuring tasks, assigning responsibilities, and ensuring tasks are completed and deadlines are met. Effective leaders will have great organisational skills, which will allow them to oversee all of their team’s activities and provide direction to their employees in an organised and structured way. 
15. Being adaptable and flexible. As a leader, you will often be faced with dynamic, ever-changing circumstances, changing tasks and deadlines, and many, many different competing priorities. Effective leaders will be able to be flexible and adaptable in their roles, so that they can continue to grow, change, adapt, and respond to changing situations. 

Women’s leadership and executive coaching programs foster the development of these skills in both emerging and current women leaders. In fact, many female leaders report feeling much more confident in their skills and abilities after attending these kinds of programs. 

Although there is no one way of measuring soft skills development, this increased sense of confidence in your abilities is one way in which you can monitor your improvement of these skills. Many women’s leadership programs will also encourage women to take part in practical interactive exercises or role plays where they are challenged to demonstrate these skills, so that they can gain hands-on experience in applying them and also get feedback on how effectively they are doing this from other female leaders – particularly more experienced ones who have already mastered these skills, who can act as mentors for their soft skills development. 

As you can see, there are a number of ways in which the development of soft skills can be measured through executive coaching and other women’s leadership programs. Both of these programs can be useful tools for aspiring and current women leaders who are wanting to develop their soft skills and become more effective as leaders. For this reason, women in leadership positions should be supported by their companies and organisations to take advantage of these kinds of programs, so that they are empowered to become the best leaders they can be.

Caroline Kennedy is an award-winning CEO with a track record of leading multinational companies with up to $250 million in revenue. She is also the founder of Empowering Women Leaders: Awaken the Powerful Leader Within – a transformative eight-week program designed to help women master the art of leadership. If you’re ready to unleash your hidden potential and become the leader that you were always meant to be, find out more at https://www.carolinekennedy.com.au/women-leadership-program/.