aut agrees. "Business success is often defined by comfort with ambiguity and risk——personal, organizational, and financial. This creates a disconnect for many scientistsbecause success in academia is really more about careful, studied research. Further,great science is often defined by how one gets to the answer as much as by the answeritself, so scientists often fall in love with the process. In a business, you need tounderstand the process, but you end up falling in love with the answer and then take arisk based on what you think that answer means to your business. Putting your neckon the line like this is a skill set that all employers look for in their best people."Another important piece of risk tolerance is a candidates degree of comfort withfailure. Failure is important because it shows that you were not afraid to take chances.So companies consistently look for candidates who can be wrong and admit it.
Everyone knows how to talk about successes——or they should if theyre in a jobsearch——but far fewer people are comfortable talking about failures, and fewer stillknow how to bring lessons and advantages back from the brink. "For my organization,a candidate needs to have comfort discussing his or her failures, and he or she needs tohave real failures, not something made up for interview day. If not, that person has nottaken enough risk." says Haut.
Trait 4: Strength in interpersonal relationships
Rick Leach is in business development for deCODE Genetics. Leach made thetransition to industry recently, on the business side of things. I asked him about thiskey trait because in his new business role, interpersonal abilities make the differencebetween success and failure. "Scientists spend their lives accumulating knowledge anddeveloping technical acumen," he says, "but working for a business requires somethingelse entirely——people skills. The scientist who is transitioning into the business worldmust prioritize his or her relationship assets above their technical assets. To suddenlybe valued and measured by your mastery of human relationships can be a very scaryproposition for a person who has been valued and measured only by his mastery ofthings," says Rick.
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