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We all have our practical skills which can be acquired through education, training programs, learning by doing. Skills we are not born knowing. Something we must teach. "Hard skills" as we often say.

In the book 'The Song of Significance', Seth Godin says we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to skills like 

• Decision-making, 
• Eager participation, 
• Dancing with fear, 
• Speaking with authority, 
• Working in teams, 
• Seeing the truth, 
• Speaking the truth, 
• Inspiring others, 
• Doing more than we are asked, 
• Caring, and 
• Being willing to change things.

He says that we tend to underinvest in training on these skills, fearful that these things are innate and can't be taught. 

We downplay them, calling them "soft skills", making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent.

These are interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. Human skills. Skills that amplify your hard vocational skills.

Adam Grant refers to "character skills" in his hook 'Hidden Potential', which are never too late to build.

• Take initiative to ask questions, 
• Seek information, 
• Get along and collaborate with peers, 
• Pay attention, 
• Take on challenging problems, 
• Do more than the assigned work, and 
• Persist in face of obstacles.

These skills can actually all be learned. Even though they are more difficult to measure, that doesn't mean we can't improve them, can't practice them, or can't change the way we do our work.

Why do we need empowerment?

What must leaders overcome mentally and emotionally to give up control yet retain full responsibility? Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose? Or do people really just want to do as they are told?

Leader-follower

In a leader-follower structure followers take orders and do what they are told to do. They rely on the leader to make all decisions. 

They have limited decision making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy and passion. 

You must release them instead. Recognize their inherent genius and creativity, and allow those talents to emerge. Let them make meaningful decisions. 

Are you as leader willing to be vulnerable to the effects of their decisions?

Turn disempowered phrases like 

• "I would like to", 
• "Could we", 
• "What should I do about" 

... into empowered phrases like 

• "We intend to", 
• "We plan on", 
• "We will". 

Ask people to state their intentions. Let them make meaningful decisions. Turn passive followers into active leaders.

Rather than giving specific lists of tasks, give broad guidance and context and tell them to prepare the tasks instead. Don't tell people to do stuff they already know they have to do. 

Resist the urge to provide solutions.

When the performance of a unit goes down after leaders leave, it is taken as a sign that they were good leaders, not that they were ineffective in training their people properly.

What comes first, mindset or behavior?

Instead of trying to change mindsets and then change the way you act, start acting differently and the new thinking will follow. You can choose to change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.

Empowerment does not work without competence and clarity. The new decision makers must have a higher level of technical knowledge and clearer sense of organizational purpose than ever before. This is leadership.

When you explain a change, people hear and think they know what you mean, but they don't. They have never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can't see in their imagination how it works. Think out loud. Be honest about what you intend to achieve and communicate that all the time, at every level.

That's how you turn a ship around.

The majority of the interactions we have at work and at home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge: I want.

But can negotiation techniques used by FBI to deal with drug dealers, terrorists and brutal killers also work with normal humans? Yes!

Active listening

We all want to be heard, understood and accepted, and listening is the cheapest, yet most effective way to get there. Negotiation is not a battle. It is a process of discovery. 

Extract and observe as much information as possible. Work in teams because these extra sets of ears will pick up extra information. We tend to hear what we want to hear.

Labeling

Imagine yourself in their place. Labeling is a way of validating someone's emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone's emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. Once you have thrown out a label, be quiet and listen.

"No" is pure gold

For good negotiators, "No" is pure gold. "No" is the start of the negotiation. A "no" gives the other party the feeling of safety, security and control. It provides a great opportunity for you and the other party to clarify what they really want by eliminating what they don't want.

"That's right"

The sweetest two words in any negotiation are "That's right". They then feel they have assessed what you have said and pronounced it as correct of their own free will. They embrace it. 

Use a summary to trigger those two words. 

Hearing "You're right" on the other hand is a disaster. They then agree, in theory, but don't own the conclusion.

What's the consequence of inaction?

To get real leverage, you have to persuade them that there is something to lose by inaction. People will make more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Most people in a negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Too few are driven by their actual goals.

Don't forget to make it happen as well

Your job as a negotiator isn't just to get to an agreement. It's getting to one that can be implemented and making sure it happens. 

Asking "how" forces your counterpart to consider and explain how it will be implemented. By making your counterparts articulate implementation in their own words, you convince them that the final solution is their idea, and that's crucial.

Incomplete information

People operating with incomplete information appear crazy to those who have different information. Your job when faced with someone like this in a negotiation is to discover what they don't know and supply that information.

"Never split the difference" by former FBI hostage negotiator Christopher Voss