Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help

leaders understand how to enhance their team's performance and enhance their employee engagement

with a single set of solutions. No burnout required. Through boot camps, keynotes, and pulse

checks, activating teams is our passion. And if yours could use a boost, send me a note

at Rachel at leadabovenoise.com. So speaking of needing a boost, that was me through four years of high

school math. Lucky for me, my dad was and still is a math teacher. And possibly the only reason I managed to graduate. Anyway, fast forward

to today, he's now helping my kids with their math, which he loves because grandkids,

but he hates because, as he loves to tell me, kids today just aren't being taught mathematics

anymore. What he means is the focus is no longer on calculating the numbers.

There are apps for that. The focus is on the problem solving. To my dad, this feels sad,

like something's been lost. To me, it feels like progress. Why should we have to learn to calculate

numbers when there's so much more we need to be

learning? My point is this. The world is changing and evolving at warped speed. And in order to keep up,

we need to always be building and cultivating key skills. But like with math, the skills we need

in the workplace today might look different than the ones we needed

most a few years ago. And we've got to prioritize. So today, let's talk about some of the most

critical skills I'm coaching my clients to focus on building in order to stay relevant and be

successful in the current iteration of the workplace. Skill number one is co-creation, harnessing the power

of collective intelligence. So there used to be a time when the expectation was that the leader and the

experts had all the answers. But today's winning leaders recognize that no one person can possibly

have all the best ideas. The world is too complex.

It's moving too quickly. So whether we're designing products, refining processes, crafting messages

...