Ep 187: Essential Skills for Successful Teens

Mark Herschberg joins us to talk about the kinds of skills they don’t teach in school, like negotiation, planning, compromise and collaboration! We’re discussing how teens can develop these skills to find career success.

Full show notes

What makes a person successful in the real world? Is it their technical knowledge, their accounting abilities, or anything else they might learn in school? 

While these qualifications  are important, there are other skills which are just as essential to personal and professional success: things like teamwork, negotiating, and planning! Without these abilities, your teen could be the greatest math whiz of all time…but find themselves unable to communicate or collaborate enough to bring their innovations into the world.

If kids aren’t learning skills like this in school, how can we teach them to be strategic and savvy adults? Turns out, we as parents can set examples about compromise and negotiation that kids take with them into adult life!  With the right conversations, we can encourage them to become leaders, developing the confidence and collaborative abilities they’ll need to cultivate the career of their dreams.

To understand how we can set up our kids for success, we’re talking to Mark Herschberg, author of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You. Originally an engineer and chief technology officer, Mark has spent much of his career launching and developing new ventures at startups, fortune 500s and academia! His MIT Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program is often referred to as MIT’s “career success accelerator”. Mark is the perfect person to tell us exactly how teens can  thrive in the professional world!

In our interview, Mark and I are discussing some of the most important qualities teens need to find success, and how they can cultivate these abilities. We’re also talking about how teens can take notes on their failures or success to inform their future endeavors, and how parents can become better negotiators to reach compromises with teens–without either side sacrificing their interests.

Essential Skills for Successful Teens

As Mark was navigating his own career as a young adult, he found that there were certain skills that were necessary for success–skills he didn’t learn in class. These abilities were not only desirable to those striving to be leaders, but to anyone with goals and dreams within the professional world! Mark realized that if he could cultivate skills like confidence, collaboration and teamwork, he’d be able to launch his career in a major way. 

In the episode, Mark uses the ability to negotiate as an example. When our teens find themselves at their first professional job,  they may simply settle for whatever salary they are initially offered. But if they attempt to negotiate, there could be some seriously awesome benefits, says Mark. Even if they just negotiate an extra thousand dollars annually, they could rack up forty thousand over forty years ... .or, more importantly, learn a lesson about how to negotiate, making them a bit better at it for when they’re hired the next time!

Mark explains that essential skills like these are not taught in high school or college. Instead, they’re discovered either by simply doing or through peer learning. If you want your teen to get a head start, Mark suggests creating a peer group to foster peer learning. In this community of young people, teens can dissect a book, podcast, or video centering on self-improvement every week. By speaking and listening to one another, they’ll gain perspective about how to change their own lives, and learn things they may have otherwise overlooked!

Another way Mark believes kids can learn is by self-reflection. Examining our past success can help us be successful again in the future–and the same goes for avoiding failures!

The Power of Self Reflection

In his experiences working in tech, Mark has often found that projects tend to go off the rails, leading those involved to complete a “post mortem” and find out just what happened. In these situations, collaborators realize that things started to go badly only a few weeks in, but no one stopped to reflect long enough to do anything about it. This causes a lack of communication, only for the whole project to go up in flames.

Mark recommends that we encourage teens to practice self reflection as they go through life, so that they don’t end up in this situation! For a teen routinely struggling to score well on the SAT, looking at the specific sections that challenged them and engaging in focused practice might allow them to improve the next time around. He explains that systems like the military and medical science often do this, calling it an “after access report.” If teens and parents can do this in their own lives, Mark believes they’ll cultivate a greater rate of success!

When a failed project is collaborative, it’s human nature to point fingers and assign blame for why things went wrong. If only our coworker wasn’t so incompetent, everything would have been fine! But Mark points out that although this is a common human tendency, sometimes we have to realize that there might be other reasons why they never responded to our email or turned in their report on time, like a sick family member, or a miscommunication! If teens are going to be successful in their careers, they’ll have to learn to be flexible when working with others.

When it comes to communication and collaboration, compromise is essential! In the episode, Mark is sharing how we can be better at compromising with teens without sacrificing what we want…while also showing them through example how to work well with others!

Why Compromise is Critical

As parents, we tend to dig in our heels and take a strong position–teens can’t have a phone until they’re a certain age, can’t go to the party they so desperately want to attend, can’t stay out past midnight. And when teens argue, it’s so tempting to throw them a “because I said so” But this isn’t going to set a very good example, says Mark. When kids enter the professional world, “because I said so” isn’t exactly the best way to communicate their intentions! Plus, it will only frustrate teens as it makes us seem like we’re just bossy and care more about control than teens happiness!

To set a better example and get teens to actually listen, Mark suggests expressing your intentions instead of taking a position right away. If you communicate what you want and your teen does the same, the two of you might be able to find a middle ground that works for both of you…as well as reach a greater understanding about what the other person is striving for! If you want your kid home before you go to bed but they want to stay out extra late, extending curfew by an hour could help both of you achieve your goals! Mark explains that compromises like this one are much more effective than “because I said so.”

In the episode, Mark talks about how parents can set a good example by making compromises. Good examples and role models can be an incredible way for teens to start developing important skills like teamwork and communication by seeing them in someone else! Mark suggests that teens take a closer look at those they look up to and pinpoint exactly what it is about that person that they admire, making it possible to absorb the qualities...