Entrepreneurial skills, soft skills and the way how to improve them

In today’s world, soft skills are increasingly important. Soft skills are sometimes hard to evaluate. These types of skills are more about your intuition, your attitude, and your ability to inspire or communicate with others. Soft skills are important because they allow you to share ideas, connect with clients, partners, and customers, and generally move forward. As an entrepreneur, the development of soft skills can go a long way toward helping you reach success. Here are soft skills that will help you to become an excellent entrepreneur:

1.Leadership

Leadership is all about motivating others and helping them find their best selves. It also requires an ability to understand people. When you know your team members and where they best fit, you are more likely to put them where they belong and that means you can build a better company.
Many people know how to be a boss. Not many know how to be a leader. A boss gives out orders. A leader is not solely focused on accomplishing tasks. They are focused on developing a team and developing the people within their team.
Leadership means:
1. Showing a willingness to work as hard as anybody on your team
2. Understanding the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that motivates each member
of your team
3. Supporting truly open communication
4. Giving feedback that is fair, timely, and constructive.
The best way to grow as a leader is to lead in an open and honest way, seek advice from mentors, and to be open to feedback from your team.

“A leader is someone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding the potential in people and processes.” Brené Brown, research professor and best-selling author

2. Teamwork

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to know how to work well with others. You might need a combination of soft skills to be effective at teamwork. It’s important to listen to others, know how to utilize your company’s human capital, and inspire people to work together for best results. It also means you need to do your own part. Recognizing your part in the team and acknowledging others’ contributions is important.

3. Problem Solving

As an entrepreneur, you need to be ready to solve any problems that come your way. This requires creativity, but you also need to have good analytical skills. With this soft skill, you should be able to analyze the situation and look at it from different angles. On top of that, it’s important to find different, sometimes out-of-the-box solutions to your problems. This is one of the best soft skills for entrepreneurs and business leaders who need to overcome obstacles and to fix an issue immediately as it occurs, or taking time to research and consult with colleagues to find a scalable, long-term solution challenges.

4. Creativity

Creativity is a broad ability incorporating many different skill sets including other soft skills and technical skills. Employees with creativity can find new ways to perform tasks, improve processes or even develop new and exciting avenues for the business to explore. Creativity can be used in any role at any level.

5. Flexibility

Are you able to change direction? Can you learn new things? Flexibility is one of those soft skills that can help you survive as an entrepreneur. With this skill, you are more likely to be willing to learn new things and move forward. If one thing doesn’t work (or stops working), you need to be flexible enough to try something else. It also helps when you are trying to manage different schedules. Your ability to have an agile mind and thought process can pave the way to success.

6. Time Management

One of the most important soft skills is time management. You need to know how to manage your time if you expect to succeed. Understand which tasks are vital to the business, and which you can do later, or delegate. Knowing how to use your time — and developing the discipline to stick to your timetable — can help you make better decisions and maximize the work you do.

7. Public Speaking

Very few of us are natural public speakers, but if you want to lead the next great start-up, you will have to learn to become comfortable speaking to groups. Speaking in front of a large crowd is not a natural activity for anyone; to get better at it, you need to learn how to do it, prepare and practice.

8. Relationship Building

Business is all about building beneficial relationships, not just for you and your company, but for your customers, vendors, and employees. Hopefully, you already possess one of the core traits required in relationship building. This is simply being a decent person who cares about others and who wants to provide them with information, assistance, or entertainment. You can begin relationship building by starting an informational blog for your customers, posting instructional videos on YouTube, or simply reaching out to potential customers with a giveaway offer. Some people are hesitant to engage in relationship building because they don’t want to risk giving something and getting nothing back in return. However, if you give it a try, you will see that for the most part, people will react positively.

9. Negotiation

Negotiation is a challenging skill to master. Basically, we negotiate dozens of times every day? But If you’ve never participated in a negotiation session before, it can feel strange contradicting what another party feels you deserve for your products and services. If you are on the other side of the negotiation table it is equally as uncomfortable. Try practicing your negotiating skills at flea markets, garage sales, and estate sales. Start by simply asking for a small discount or a buy one get one free offer.

10. Empathy

Empathy is one of the most important skills that an entrepreneur can acquire. Empathy includes the feeling of compassion, as a result of understanding where another person is coming from. If you develop a strong sense of empathy, it will help you to approach customer service issues from a position of understanding, support and motivate your employees, and even to develop content to which your customers can relate. The great way of working on empathy is careful listening. The more you listen, the more you understand the other person’s point of view. In order to truly listen, however, you have to engage in active listening. This means asking questions to clarify and learn more and repeating back what you have heard to show that you understand.

“We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.” – Carl Rogers

11. Self-Awareness

It is vital that an entrepreneur have a clear insight into their personality, especially their strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, and emotions. When an entrepreneur is selfaware, it can lead them to beneficial partnerships and agreements. Without good self-awareness, leaders become easily persuaded and spineless. Self-awareness also includes control. Becoming overly emotional, for example, can lead to detrimental impulsive decision making.

12. Risk management

Risk management focuses on identifying what could go wrong, evaluating which risks should be dealt with and implementing strategies to deal with those risks. Risking is a part of being a successful entrepreneur, taking risks can’t be avoided. Businesses that have identified the risks will be better prepared and have a more cost-effective way of dealing with them.

Here is how you can improve your soft skills:

1.Practice makes perfect.

Choose a soft skill that you want to improve and practice it persistently You can improve any soft skill if you make it a practice. Most soft skills are a matter of routine. For example, you can practice dependability both on the job and at home by improving punctuality (showing up to work or events on time or early, for example) and starting on projects at work earlier so you can complete them ahead of schedule.

2. Find a mentor or an online course

It is easy to find lots of resources to help you improving the soft skills. You can find books, podcasts or online classes. While some require payment, many are free of cost and can be accessed at any time. You might try out a few different types of resources to see which are best for your learning style.

3. Observe and mimic the positive soft skills you see in others.

There are likely professionals you know or work with who have strengths in various soft skills. You may be able to develop integral soft skills by observing the practices of others and incorporating them into your own daily routine. You may find, for example, that effective communicators often write down notes when others are talking during meetings. Quite often, this helps them organize their thoughts so they are prepared to ask and answer important questions. This is also an active listening practice that may be good to utilize as part of your own work.

4. Set clear goals for improving your soft skills

Set specific, measurable goals by carefully reading your performance reviews at work or asking trusted friends and colleagues for constructive criticism. This can help you to both identify key areas of improvement for goal setting and areas of strength to highlight on your resume and in interviews. You can prioritize which soft skills to work on based on those that you need to get a certain job or move up in a career you already have.