5 Personal Core Competencies for the 21st Century

BNET

By Sean Silverthorne

August 13th, 2009 @ 5:32 am

Every epoch requires people and organizations to develop core competencies or skills needed to be successful. …

What are the core competencies needed in this century? Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Helen Haste has identified five that we should begin teaching our students. We business managers should also consider how to bring these skills to our companies and careers.

• Managing Ambiguity. “Managing ambiguity is that tension between rushing to the clear, the concrete, and managing this ambiguous fuzzy area in the middle. … Because we have to counter the story of a single linear solution.”
• Agency and Responsibility. “We have to be able to take responsibility and know what that means. Being an effective agent means being able to approach one’s environment, social or physical, with a confidence that one actually will be able to deal with it.”
• Finding and Sustaining Community. “Managing community is partly about that multitasking of connecting and interacting. …”
• Managing Emotion. “Really it’s about getting away from the idea that emotion and reason are separate…”
• Managing Technological Change. “When we have a new tool, we first use it for what we are already doing, just doing it a bit better. But gradually, the new tool changes the way we do things. It changes our social practices.”

See her video Five Competences for Adapting to a Changing World. (Sorry, no direct link available.)

What’s missing from this list? What personal core competencies would you add that are necessary to be successful in our new century?