Aside from your technical skills, you will also need to be able to navigate organizational dysfunction, the personalities that drive it, and the relationships between those personalities.

Truthfully, even when in positions of organizational power, those personalities conflate these with “social skills” and almost invariably do not fully understand themselves, their tactics, or the reasons for their success.

This means that if you do have those skills, and understand why they work, you will not only be able to often protect yourself from their dysfunction and schemes, but navigate and excel in your environment in ways your raw skillsets do not provide.

I take the perspective of ‘dysfunction’ in this context, because, overwhelmingly, organizations of all sizes, particularly corporations, almost exclusively, are rife with dysfunction covered by a thin veil of artificial culture that requires of its participants the reinforcement of the falsehood that noticing its problems means there’s something wrong with the noticer.

This new skill arena is that of “political skill”.

I am untalented in this area, but I can say that this was identified as the most critical skill to have for career advancement in any field of human endeavor and that there is strong academic consensus on this in the field that studies it, to the point that it has been confirmed, validated, isolated, and tested in various studies. The results are interesting. Reading about them is boring, but seemingly important.

The list: