I suspect you’ve heard of soft skills. But, have you read about rebranding them from soft skills to power skills? I first saw it in the Harvard Business Review: Why Leaders Need Power Skills, April 15, 2026. Subsequently, I did some reading and found it mentioned by Josh Bersin in “Let’s Stop Talking About Soft Skills: They’re Power Skills,” November 16, 2020, and by Rachel Wells in “Soft Skills vs Power Skills: Is There a Difference,” Forbes, Feb 19, 2024.

Some of the power skills mentioned in the articles are:

courage
tenacity
optimism
curiosity
creativity
empathy
flexibility
collaboration and teamwork
effective communication
problem-solving
critical thinking
innovation
the ability to gain and use data info
listening
trust

Josh suggests the rebrand as power skills is appropriate because “in reality, they are the skills that give you real ‘power’ at work.” I would add that the same is true for teachers and students who use them in the classroom.

Give the list another look. Can you see them as habits and positions of power and learning? How so? Look for them in the classroom. Who’s using the skills? When are they using them? How are they using them? When you notice them, look more deeply. What do you notice? What do you think? What do you wonder?

Here are some of my thoughts.

The choice to be courageous helps us be brave, try new things, share ideas, and listen.

Tenacity and optimism help us stick to a task and believe it is indeed true that “I can do hard things every single day.”

Curiosity drives us to explore what we do not yet know, to be motivated by wonder and awe, and to approach things from unique perspectives. It requires flexibility and increases joy.

Empathy encourages us to listen, to give grace, to allow others (and ourselves) to try, use their big beautiful brains, fail, learn, and succeed. Empathy helps us understand more deeply.

Communication is essential for sharing ideas, collaborating, and working together as a team. All these things enhance our abilities to problem-solve, think critically, and innovate.

With this in mind, I want to highlight and modify, including teachers and students (both leaders in our learning journey), what Ruth wrote in her HBR article. When teachers and students use their power skills, everyone feels trusted, motivated, and included, and learning is supported and enhanced. 

Here are some times my pre-K-ers and I used power skills to make our math moments fascinating, fun, and filled with deep mathematical thinking. What power skills do you notice? How is it impacting the learners and learning?

One of the mighty mathematicians was enamored of her sibling’s ability to do multiplication. She told me about the math she experienced and said she wanted to do it, too. We talked about multiplication. I told her multiplication is kind of like adding groups. For instance, 3×3 tells you that you have three groups of 3. We used our fingers to figure out how many things are in 3 groups of three.

She wanted to do more, so we grabbed some pegs and represented the abstract concept of multiplication thinking and work in a very concrete way — on the pegboard. Another mighty mathematician asked if she could play, too. They talked, counted and created and solved multiplication problems together.

These mathematicians explored and translated dominos from the pips on each side of the domino to a ten frame.

They kept their dominoes secret from one another and guessed what they looked like from the information on the 10 frames. They enjoyed the secrecy and the mathematical conversations. Often their ideas required further communication. For instance, is it a 10-frame if it doesn’t have 10 pegs in it? What makes you say that? One mathematician created a 1-frame and a 4-frame to share with her fellow mathematicians.

The mathematicians wondered and speculated what to do when their domino had more than 10 dots in all, or had more than 5 dots on either side. Would it be ok to add it to the second row of the 10-frame? Could they just let it sit outside their 10-frame? Lots of experimentation and conversation ensued.

Finally, they worked independently to figure out how many there were in all. They shared their answers and their thinking, celebrated if they both got the same (and accurate) answer, and discussed if their answers were not the same. Often, they used different strategies to calculate the total, and as they shared their strategies, they discovered even more ways to solve the problem.

As we cleaned up for lunch, several mathematicians inquired, “When are we doing that again, Ms. James? … Yeah, when are we doing that again?”

Soon, mighty and powerful ones, soon!