- Following his death at age 100, former President Jimmy Carter’s decades-old advice for success in business still applies today.
Former President Jimmy Carter’s advice for success in business comes down to respect.
After Carter’s death at age 100, he is remembered for his ability to mediate conflicts and get people to find common ground.
This skill served him while growing his family’s peanut-farming business in his younger years, and while brokering the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel later on. Carter would go on to win a Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work through his foundation.
In a 1998 interview in The Harvard Business Review recently resurfaced by Business Insider, Carter expressed the importance of navigating negotiations with respect and empathy.
“All negotiations, whether in government or business, require certain things. One is a proper respect for the people across from you whose opinions differ from yours. You can’t be arrogant,” Carter said. “You’ve got to give the people with whom you’re contending your understanding—not your agreement but your understanding. It requires some humility to recognize that you’re not inherently better than they are.”
Having empathy and respect for others can help work out compromises for the greater good, according to Carter. That means being humble, and genuinely hearing what professional colleagues and business partners have to say.
The importance of soft skills
Carter’s advice from decades ago is increasingly relevant for success in business today.
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, replacing the need for many traditional hard skills like computing or calculations, experts have stressed the importance of having soft skills that can’t be replaced by a machine.
Researchers have said we are currently in a soft skills crisis, with 1 in 4 hiring managers saying they wouldn’t hire entry-level Gen Z graduates for a job.
The biggest factor driving this lack of confidence is a perceived lack of soft skills like strong communication and the ability to adapt to changes. These skills are essential for thriving at work, Fortune‘s Jane Thier wrote in a recent report.
Employers should consider investing in soft skills instruction in the same way they provide instruction for technical skills, according to a recent Deloitte study featured in Fortune‘s CHRO Daily newsletter.
Other successful leaders have echoed Carter’s advice to tap into empathy.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stressed the importance of relating to others in a 2023 interview with Axel Springer.
“Empathy is not a soft skill,” Nadella said in the interview. “In fact, it’s the hardest skill we learn—to relate to the world, to relate to people that matter the most to us.”
