In an interview in the New York Times recently, Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta Air Lines, identified communication skills and a strong work ethic as the most important skills he seeks when hiring senior level staff.
Here are excerpts:
Q. Let’s talk about hiring. What are you looking for in job candidates?
A. Typically, when you’re hiring a vice president of a company, they already have the résumé and they already have the experience base. And so what you’re trying to find out about are the intangibles of leadership, communication style and the ability to, today, really adapt to change.
Q. What are you listening for as somebody describes their family, where they’re from, etc.?
A. You’re looking for a really strong set of values. You’re looking for a really good work ethic. Really good communication skills. More and more, the ability to speak well and write is important. You know, writing is not something that is taught as strongly as it should be in the educational curriculum. So you’re looking for communication skills…It’s not just enough to be able to just do a nice PowerPoint presentation… You’ve got to have the ability to communicate.
Q. And is there any change in the kind of qualities you’re looking for compared with 5, 10 years ago?
A. I think this communication point is getting more and more important. People really have to be able to handle the written and spoken word. And when I say written word, I don’t mean PowerPoints. I don’t think PowerPoints help people think as clearly as they should because you don’t have to put a complete thought in place. You can just put a phrase with a bullet in front of it. And it doesn’t have a subject, a verb and an object, so you aren’t expressing complete thoughts.
And a lot of what we do in communication, when you write e-mail, you need to express yourself very clearly so people understand whether we’re going to L.A. today or we’re going to Boston today.
Read the full interview in the New York Times.
Strong business writing is absolutely essential to advance your career. As Peter Drucker stated, “As soon as you put one foot on the career ladder, your ability to succeed depends on your communication skills. The memo, the sales letter, the report…these are critical tools of the employee.”
Calculate the value of your own better business writing skills to your organization with this spreadsheet.
(Photo Credit: Librado Romero/NY Times)
