Every executive and entrepreneur should know how to use their soft skills to build high performing teams. In this article, I wrote about connect-working and how my ASSET framework is all about using soft skills to build stronger personal and professional relationships. I mentioned that I would share with you another personal framework for developing stronger soft skills, or what some people like to call ‘power skills,’ and that’s the purpose of this article. Since I don’t have a better name for this, I guess we can call it, “Sam Cho’s Triangle” for now.

The triangle outline is actually comprised of 4 connected triangles and looks like this:

Have you ever heard of the term “connect-working” before? I promise you that it’s not just another cheesy phrase for the word, networking! According to my research, the first person to coin this word/phrase was author Anna McCoy in her book, “Woman, Act Now.” Back in 2008, McCoy wrote, “Networking is driven by the question, ‘What’s in it for me?’ Conversely, connect-working operates by the question, ‘What’s in it for others?’”

To bring clarity between the similarities and differences between connect-working and networking, I created a framework to better illustrate how each activity can be used as an “ASSET” for building personal and professional relationships. I’m not saying that one is better than the other, but for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll be placing more emphasis on connect-working because it might seem like a more novel idea.

In this framework, ASSET stands for: