Championship Habits: Soft Skills in Hard Times for Leaders and Managers

By Adolph Brown III

Most employees are educated and trained with the technical or hard skills necessary to perform their professions, but important componentssoft skillsare often lacking. These skills represent a cluster of personal qualities, habits, attitudes, and social graces that make a person a good employee and a compatible coworker.

Developed for organizations that deal with customers face-to-face, Championship Habits outlines twenty core soft skills that author and successful entrepreneur Adolph Brown believes are the cornerstones of a successful business. Based on years of personal experience and research, he identified these core soft skills, or championship habits, which employees should possess. Some of them include:

Strong work ethic
Sociability
Self-esteem
Confidence
Positive attitude
Self-management
Listening skills
Social skills

By translating cutting-edge theory into concise, hip language with lasting and emotional impact and including a host of illustrative examples, Championship Habits describes the importance of these twenty core personal qualities and interpersonal traits in a business environment. He shows how incorporating these championship habits at every turn will ensure that the workplace and the work itself are rewarding, profitable, and gratifying.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440143618

Adolph Brown III

Adolph Brown III is an award-winning tenured educator and senior administrator and the founder of the Wellness Group Inc. He is also the author of Real Talk and Messages from Granddad. Brown and his wife, Marla, have seven children and live in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Visit him online at www.docspeaks.com.

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Copyright © 2009 Adolph Brown, III.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-4360-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-4361-8 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 8/6/2015

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One: Be All That You Were Meant To Be!

Chapter Two: What I Didn’t Learn In Graduate School

Chapter Three: The Case for Emotional Intelligence

Chapter Four: Attitude Is Still Everything

Chapter Five: Take Care of Your Customers or Someone Else Will

Chapter Six: Talk and Walk Like a Winner

Chapter Seven: Differentiation of Leaders and Managers

Chapter Eight: How to Put Soft Skills into Hardwired Environments

Chapter Nine: The Hard Case for Soft Skills

Chapter Ten: A Sense of Entitlement

Chapter Eleven: The Big Dance!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Don Perlyn, a devoted husband, an extraordinary father, and the esteemed results-oriented executive vice-president of Nathan’s Famous, Inc. Don saw the big picture and was immensely reassuring in guiding a consultant and trainer through a steep learning curve in corporate circles long before I knew there was a book to be written.

Without Don’s support and encouragement, this book would still be a twinkling in my eye and a yearning in my heart. Also by recruiting me to provide soft skills training for the corporate offices of Miami Subs Grille and Nathan’s Famous, Inc., Don’s confidence in my skills was inspiring. I would also like to thank all the organizations and corporations who have since partnered with me to learn together, to grow together, and of course WIN TOGETHER!

Acknowledgments

Successful people form the habit of doing what failures don’t like to do. They like the results they get by doing what they don’t necessarily enjoy.

-Earl Nightengale

If I presume to write about the things I believe I have seen and experienced from my vantage point, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants. These giants have allowed me to observe the world from atop their shoulders. I thank every supervisor I have had, every corporation that employed me, and every staff person, colleague, peer, and employee who ever believed in me.

I would also like to