Here’s the fact: your technical skills aren’t enough to help you thrive in your career. As a finance professional, you should also focus on the often-overlooked tools to career success, often known as soft skills.
Today’s job market can be competitive. So how do you stay relevant and set yourself apart? Having strong financial skills is assumed to be a give. Employers are increasingly seeking professionals who can not only crunch numbers but also communicate effectively, collaborate seamlessly, and adapt to change.
That’s why in this blog post, we’ll discuss the essential soft skills that finance professionals need to thrive in today’s dynamic business environment. These skills can help you build stronger relationships, enhance your influence, and may even help you land your dream job. So, let’s explore the essential soft skills that can take your finance career to new heights.
What Are Essential Soft Skills?
Soft skills are universal qualities that help professionals succeed in any type of workplace and are not job-specific. They include what we commonly refer to as interpersonal or transferable skills. Like many coaches and trainers, I’m not a big fan of the term Soft Skills. I personally prefer “Essential Skills” because it helps professionals to focus on what’s required. As finance professionals, technical skills are often a give from our studies and training (on and off the job). Where we may not have had specific training—or indeed, great role models—is in some of these soft skill areas. Gaining these gives us the biggest potential and opportunity to advance in our careers.
8 Essential Soft Skills For Finance Professionals
So, what are the essential soft skills for finance professionals?
Self-awareness:
This is a great one to start with. Self-awareness can be simple and yet not easy, but it can give finance professionals so much opportunity. It refers to the conscious understanding of our thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and motivations. It can also help us to better understand how we interact with others, and to improve this for the better.
Communication:
Again, this sounds simple yet is rarely something that is taught in education or beyond. We rarely work in a vacuum, so being able to communicate with others is an essential soft skill. This includes communicating both to and from others (as we frequently do both simultaneously). It can also include an understanding of different communication styles and how best to adapt these depending on who we’re speaking to. To learn more about understanding and enhancing your own communication, contact me!
Emotional Intelligence:
Emotional intelligence is a phrase we often hear, but it’s surprising how many people don’t fully understand it. I like to keep it simple: it’s about being able to identify, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions. Like many things, we need to be able to walk before we can run. So we need to understand and use this by others first, before turning our focus to others. Being able to lean into our emotions (and, yes, we all have them!) is a critical first step.
Relationships:
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As I mentioned in the communications section above, we rarely work in a vacuum. Being able to not only work with others, but also to build productive, professional relationships with them can bring countless benefits. It can also make things much more pleasant and even fun! Sometimes these relationships blossom naturally. Sometimes they need a helping hand. Most relationships need a combination of openness, trust, and rapport for full impact. Knowing when to listen/talk, as well as when to give and take, can also be key for supporting relationship growth.
Stakeholder Management:
Closely linked to relationships is stakeholder management. Simply put, this is about how you organise, monitor, and improve relationships with your stakeholders. Your stakeholders will depend on your particular role but could include a combination of your direct manager, higher managers, direct reports, peers, internal customers, external customers, etc. Identifying who’s who, and who needs what from your professional relationships, and then working in a way that enables this, can be enjoyable and productive.
Collaboration:
Linked to many of these other skills is collaboration. In general terms, this means working with others for a common purpose. This is often a common requirement of many roles, either within their work groups or cross-functionally. Being able to identify the relevant common purpose, as well as clarifying roles and responsibilities is key. Combining relationships, communication, and emotional intelligence will also be useful here.
Time Management:
We cannot manage time per se, but we can manage what we do with it. Being aware of our priorities, what needs to be done by when, and interconnecting dependencies is key. This is typically an essential soft skill that we become pretty adept at (in our professional lives at least) because if we don’t, we risk dropping balls all over the place or becoming burnt out. Knowing the value of the tasks we have to do and considering their importance or urgency is paramount, to ensure we’re always working on the right things. This can include knowing where we don’t want to spend our time too.
Have you also considered how your natural circadian rhythm plays a role in your energy and ability to focus? Working with these can be a gamechanger to your productivity.
Leadership:
Whether you’re in an official leadership or managerial position, or not, we can all flex our leadership muscles. This often starts by leading ourselves. Self-leadership is about being able to influence and direct your thoughts and actions to successfully reach our goals. “Leading by example”—doing the right thing at all times – is also a great attribute, and one that can help you to be known for this. In terms of leading others, being able to set a direction and articulate it to others so that they’ll want to follow can also be practiced regardless of role.
How Finance Professionals Can Develop Essential Soft Skills
While it sounds like there’s a lot to juggle, developing these essential soft skills is completely achievable due to the connectedness of many of them. Begin with some self-reflection. Determine one or two areas of improvement and make a plan. To improve your abilities, enrol in online courses such as our Essential Soft Skills courses for accountants and finance professionals.
Look for opportunities to practice effective communication, relationship building and collaboration within your day-to-day relationships. Get input from mentors and coworkers.
Remind yourself that essential soft skills are like muscles in that they can feel uncomfortable at first, and you can strengthen them with regular use.
