There’s a growing leadership gap that few are talking about. Many leaders are relying on skills that no longer match the needs and demands of their role and today’s workplace. The unintended consequences are popping up everywhere. Trust is eroding, employee engagement is at an all-time low, talent is leaving and innovation is suffering.

As leaders ascend the corporate ladder, technical expertise is no longer the differentiator. In its place emerges the ability to engage, listen, empathize and build trust at scale. Sadly, too many leaders operate as if these soft skills, or as I prefer to call them, power skills, are optional. They’re not. As a performance scholar and strategist who coaches, speaks and writes about success and high achievement, I’ve found that when leaders master them, they have power to not just manage performance but to mobilize and motivate their people.

HARD SKILLS GET YOU PROMOTED. POWER SKILLS KEEP YOU THERE.

Early in your career, your success comes from your ability to produce measurable output. But as you advance, your technical excellence becomes less relevant to your current role. Instead, leaders are judged by the problems they solve through strategy, innovation and inspiring their teams to produce their best work.

When leaders use their power skills, team members feel trusted, motivated and included.

The good news is that power skills are learnable, measurable and trainable — for those leaders who invest in them and want to see returns in trust, engagement and execution.

BUILDING YOUR POWER SKILLS

Power skills are not built through one-time actions. Rather, they are developed by small, intentional behaviors that leaders practice regularly. These are the habits and behaviors that strengthen trust, connection and impact.

Leadership Listening Tours

Conduct listening tours by meeting employees where the work actually happens through small group conversations, informal walk-arounds and one-on-one discussions. Listen to your teams, but do so with an ear to understand, not solve. Look for patterns across what you hear, and resist the urge to fill silence by blurting your first thought. Take an intentional pause which can shift you from reacting to leading.

Empathy Shadowing

Empathy shadowing helps leaders understand the full ecosystem — customers, employees and the processes connecting them. By visiting employees where they actually work, leaders can wrap their head around problems in real time and see them, and their response, as they unfold.

Empathy shadowing is more powerful than a listening tour as it replaces stories about the work with firsthand experience inside it. Leaders watch the interruptions, system glitches and the human workarounds in real time. It reveals the pain points that no survey or retrospective feedback can truly capture.

Reverse Mentoring

Reverse mentoring begins by identifying people whose experiences differ from your own, and who can help surface perspectives you may not naturally see across culture, religion, gender, generational or workplace dynamics. Leaders may work with one reverse mentor or several, each offering insight into different perspectives the leader may not share. These relationships can take the form of regular conversations, small group discussions or structured mentoring sessions where the leader intentionally becomes the learner. True mentoring relationships don’t have a firm end date and can continue as new issues and blind spots emerge.

The best leaders are lifelong learners and understanding how to connect with others is the game changer. Technical skills may get you promoted into leadership, but power skills are what sustain your effectiveness once you are there. Don’t outsource humanity. Lead with it.

Here are three strategic skills that you, as a young professional, should invest in earlier in your career to help you reach your long-term goals faster:

1. CULTIVATE FOLLOWERSHIP ON DAY ONE.

To achieve any long-term goal, you will ultimately need your superiors to advocate for you, your peers to validate your ideas and those more junior to you to help you execute. Here’s how to get there:

— MANAGE UP: KNOW YOUR MANAGER’S GOALS AND RESPECT THEIR TIME. During one-on-one and team meetings, make sure you have a clear understanding of your manager’s and team’s short and long-term goals. If you and your manager are aligned, you’re more likely to reach your goals faster. Respect their time and be an efficient problem solver. You want to show your boss that you’re a dependable and decisive thought partner.

— MANAGE SIDEWAYS: FORGE STRONG TIES WITH PEERS TO BUILD MOMENTUM. Aim to foster strong bonds with your colleagues and build an environment where you can share feedback. The goal is to develop yourself as a good collaborator and critical thinker.

— MANAGE DOWN: MENTOR AND TEACH. Whenever you can, invest in educating junior members on your team. Mentoring is a great way to hone your leadership skills, as it helps you become a more active listener, broadens your perspective and sharpens your storytelling abilities.

2. STRENGTHEN YOUR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (EI).

EI is our ability to understand, manage and use our emotions in ways that help us relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict. Young professionals can work on building their EI by leveraging personal assessment tools. These tools can help you understand your strengths, growth areas and biases, as well as how they might differ from others.

Just as importantly, personality tests can teach you about common personalities in the workplace. This can be helpful when you find yourself having to influence with little to no authority — something that happens often as a young professional. By studying the strengths and weaknesses of common personality types, you can modify your delivery and communication style to maximize your influence.

3. MASTER VISUAL STORYTELLING.

Visual storytelling allows you to visually lead your audience through a calculated sequence of facts, making it easier for them to think the way you want them to. There are multiple ways for young professionals to deepen this skill: exploring data visualization courses or intently learning how to use data visualization tools/products to explain why and how evidence supports your ideas or arguments.

Based on my experience, the best way to hone this skill is by studying different companies’ corporate presentations. These can often be found on the company websites under their “investor relations” tab if they are a publicly traded company. They can give you examples of how to organize and visualize ideas in ways you might not have thought of.

Young professionals often miss out on investing in strategic interpersonal skills in lieu of learning technical skills. Start developing your interpersonal skills early to get a head start on securing future promotions that may just make your career.