Necessary Skills for Success

July 23, 2020

If you are an aspiring business leader, there are many abstract skills that can help you on your journey. While most people understand their personal strengths, it may be hard at times to look past them and understand the areas you lack. When you are the head of a business, there are many skills that you need to gradually build over time as you hire more employees and expand to new areas. After all, you can’t find a single CEO that doesn’t preach the necessity of constant learning and improvement.

With this in mind, here are some of the most crucial foundational skills to help you on your journey.

Intuition and Spotting Opportunities

In business, your gut instinct is everything. Whether you are dealing with a new client, negotiating over a big deal, or looking for a new manufacturer, you need to have strong intuition to follow. This goes hand in hand with identifying new opportunities. If you see a chance to possibly make a huge return, it’s important to seize it immediately. Yet while you may understand the value of having fine-tuned intuition, getting it is another matter. The truth is, this is something that only comes from experience.

Instead of spending years facing challenges and overcoming them, there are certain activities that can help you build your intuition in a business frame. Games like poker, and especially blackjack are immensely helpful for many reasons. Not only will blackjack train your intuition from the repetitions of receiving hands versus the dealer, you will also build many other skills as well. Aspects of the game like pot management, pattern recognition, quick math and spotting opportunities are also applicable to the traditional business mindset.

For those that don’t have experience playing blackjack, it can be intimidating to get started. It may be a good idea to practice by playing standard blackjack online or its variations, like Spanish 21 or Atlantic City Blackjack, to learn the basics before playing in person. Once you understand the flow of these types of card games, you can start to build the useful skills that come with each.

Public Speaking

When it comes to crucial business skills, public speaking is not only one of the most important but also one of the most overlooked. While the stereotypical perception of a leader might be someone with many strong and admirable traits, the fact is that many people are just not confident enough to speak in front of a large audience. If you regularly find yourself in front of a crowded boardroom or just speaking to a small group of employees, this is one skill that needs to be honed.

Public speaking will enable you to give clear and concise instructions to your employees, and can also help when motivating your team. There are many philosophies to study that can help you deal with any social anxieties that come from public speaking. Unfortunately, this is simply not a skill that you can build at home talking in front of a mirror. To become better at public speaking, you need to put yourself in situations that will allow you to practice. Maybe for you those situations would be in the workplace, or in social situations with friends. If there are live events that you know of, maybe you could offer to lend a hand. If you need formal training, make sure to take a locally-based course that gives you ample opportunity to practice in front of your peers.

Delegating Responsibility and Seeing Potential in Others

There is no potential for a business to truly expand without the help of others. If you have a vision, you need to be able to relay it to other people and inspire them to help you achieve your goals. That said, if there is one skill that is an absolute necessity for business owners, it’s delegating responsibility where you can. Expanding on that concept, you also need to be able to hire the appropriate people and see their natural potential.

Hiring is an art form in itself. You not only need to find suitable candidates but also filter them by their experience, and understand what positions they best fit in. A business owner simply does not have the time to take care of all aspects of the business at once, and most people find that they hit their ceiling when they are so busy with mundane tasks that they no longer have the time to think about the bigger picture. Hire the right people for the right jobs, trust them to do them efficiently, and you will see your business expand in no time.