10 skills even the best employees should always work on (and why)

No matter where you are in your career, you will always have opportunities to learn. This is especially true when it comes to upgrading certain skills that only become more important as you move up the corporate ladder. Skills such as empathy, adaptability and even active listening all require constant practice and refinement to be truly mastered, even for those who already feel like they have mastered them.

Here, ten members of the Young Entrepreneur Council discuss these skills and more, and explain why they think working on the following skills can have a major impact on your career.

1. Empathy

No matter who you are or what you do, empathy is one of the most important skills in your professional and personal life. Whether you're in marketing and looking to create sales messaging that truly connects with customers, or you're in manufacturing and need to collaborate with coworkers, bosses, and subordinates, the empathy will help you do all of this better. It's not always easy to practice, but like anything else, you can work on it and get better every day! - Alex Brown, The Beard Club

2. Patience

Some people are equipped with patience from an early age. For others, it takes a long time to cultivate it, if they ever do. Work can be stressful for many people, especially if you work in a fast-paced industry. You will be doing yourself and others no favors if you act impatiently in your work, whether by actions or words. Impatience leads to frustration, which results in negative emotions or interactions in the work environment. From there morale can easily slip and you get a vicious cycle. Essentially, you'll be “spinning your wheels” and getting upset all the time, which isn't healthy. My advice is to take a step back, pull yourself together mentally even if you only have a moment to do so, and then come back with a cooler head. - Kristy Knichel, Knichel Logistics

3. Managing Expectations

Most people do a very poor job of managing expectations when that's all they need to get everyone happy with the outcome. It's simple: Understand what your colleagues, stakeholders, customers, supervisors, and leaders see as a successful outcome, match it to reality and feasibility, then communicate and help them see the process unfold so that the end result be as close to what they wanted as possible. Even if it's not perfect, they know why and live with it. The point here is that just doing a good job is not enough and no matter how hard you try the outcome can still be perceived as poor so managing expectations becomes much more important in how your job is received and rewarded, regardless of hierarchy, function or sector of activity. - Devesh Dwivedi, Devesh Dwivedi

4. Communications

Effect...