How many of these eight leadership skills are you using?
You know that getting performance from your team takes leadership so how many of these leadership skills are you or your managers using?
- Do you communicate? Have you created and communicated the vision and strategy for your business? Is it compelling? Do your managers know what the goals are and what is expected of them to achieve that vision?
- Do you involve your team in solving problems and in driving continuous improvement? How effective are you in fostering collaboration within the team to solve problems?
- Do you hold your people accountable? Without clear expectations and metrics, how will you, and they, know how they are performing?
- Do you give feedback, celebrate success and reward performance? Without recognition, top talent will move to your competitor.
- Do you coach and mentor your team? How much of your budget is spent on training and developing your people? A key factor in staff engagement is mastery – are they getting better, learning new skills and mastering their job.
- Do you challenge your people and do you give them opportunities to get out of their comfort zone to learn new skills and develop as individuals and team players?
- Do you tolerate and do they learn from failure? There is no progress without action and with action comes risk. How do you deal with failure and mistakes? The initiative is often driven out of organisations due to a culture of fear.
- Do you live your values and use them to drive the behaviours you want within the business? Do you lead by example?
Being a successful leader requires people skills. Leadership requires the emotional capacity to tolerate uncertainty, frustration, and pain. A leader has to be able to raise tough questions without getting too anxious themselves
Leadership requires listening, observing and communication skills. It requires being a genuine person and in some cases it means being vulnerable.
The good news is you can develop leadership skills. Start with the eight above and go lead.