4 Leadership Skills (and How to Grow Them)
Anyone can be placed in a position of leadership. However, to thrive and excel in that role, one needs solid leadership skills. Strong leadership skills are at the top of the list of competencies that employers focus on when recruiting people or promoting talent within an organization.
High-ranking firms search for candidates with refined and polished leadership skills to fill their most sought-after executive positions. These skills can include:
1. Relationship-Building or Team-Building Skills
2. Problem-Solving Skills
3. Delegation Skills
4. Interpersonal Skills
In this article, we will look at leadership skills and how you can master them.
Here is everything you need to know.
The Premise: What Are Leadership Skills?
Leadership skills are the abilities and strengths individuals demonstrate that help them oversee processes, lead initiatives, and steer their employees towards achieving their goals. These skills are imperative in a workplace where cross-team members work together and cooperate.
In addition, leadership skills are a vital component in positioning executives to make wise and thoughtful decisions about their organization's goals and mission and properly allocate resources to attain those directives. Valuable leadership skills encompass the ability to inspire, communicate, and delegate effectively. Other leadership qualities include confidence, creativity, commitment, and honesty.
What Makes a Good Leader?
Good leaders are crucial for any organization. They can effectively build strong teams within a project and ensure initiatives, projects, and other work functions are carried out smoothly and successfully. Good leaders have strong communication and interpersonal skills, and anyone can become one by learning how to hone and exercise leadership abilities.
Most employees have witnessed the impact of both ineffective and effective leaders on the job. Good leaders create a positive work environment, boost employee engagement, and eliminate obstacles and hurdles for their team. Good leadership is even contagious, motivating individuals to implement positive leadership traits in their work.
Top 4 Leadership Skills and How to Sharpen Them
Almost all positive soft skills can be considered leadership skills. For instance, active listening allows leaders to listen to the concerns and ideas of team members. On the other hand, empathy enables leaders to understand how their team feels about the environment, workload, and workplace relationships.
Here's a list of leadership skills that can prove helpful to anyone applying for a new job or aiming to progress in their career.
1. Team-Building or Relationship-Building
Leadership requires the skill to build and maintain a collaborative and strong team of individuals working towards similar goals. Team-building requires various leadership strengths, such as effective conflict resolution and communication skills.
Team-building is perhaps one of the most important skills in a leadership role as it makes the communication of responsibilities, goals, and tasks more effective. Once you know each other, you will benefit by being able to evaluate strengths, allocate tasks, and accomplish your objectives more efficiently.
But that's not all – establishing good working relationships can even help leaders boost employee engagement. In fact, according to Gallup's meta-analysis of employee engagement, businesses with high employee engagement had 37% less absenteeism. Moreover, higher employee engagement also resulted in a 21% increase in productivity.
Therefore, leaders need to be skilled in building good relationships to be effective. If you have a highly engaged team, you will definitely feel well-respected as a good leader.
How to Master Team-Building Skills
The best way to master your team-building skills is to be aware of how you work and get to know the rest of the team members. As the team leader, you need to be highly aware of your leadership techniques and styles. In addition, you need to understand your team members to boost camaraderie.
For starters, ask yourself if they are as effective as you think. Think about how well they're accepted by the team you're trying to lead. Assess yourself and be critical about what you can do to improve, particularly in areas that will benefit the people you are leading.
Even though you might be in charge, those who work for you might not appreciate your working style. You might have good intentions, but always remember to hold yourself accountable to course-correct and alter your method if needed to assure that you lead from a position of respectability and strength.
Just the way you need to hold yourself accountable for your actions to assure you maximize results and performance, you need to take the time to get to know your team and encourage team spirit. Make sure to familiarize yourself with the needs of your team, embrace differences, and help your colleagues understand their value. Doing this will help you be aware of how they think and what you need to do to motivate them to excel beyond what's expected from them.
1. Problem-Solving Skills
Great leaders make good decisions and solve problems effectively. They can stay calm and identify, define, and assess problems, use a problem-solving process, come up with decision-making strategies, generate possible solutions, judge and assess solutions, pick solutions, and execute them.
Problem-solving skills allow leaders to make swift decisions, remove obstacles within their team and external teams, and make sure projects are wrapped up on time.
How to Grow Your Problem Solving Skills
It is easy to become focused on the conditions that led to the problem in the first place. Nevertheless, when you are trying to develop your problem-solving skills as a leader, you must shift your focus away from the existing problem to potential solutions and outcomes to get a more positive outlook and visualize new solutions.
When you are problem-solving with your team members, it is crucial that you agree to some basic rules and processes before initiating the problem-solving process. This is going to help streamline the process and prevent conflicts down the road.
Keep in mind that the best problem solvers are excellent listeners. Problem-solving requires you to take in a variety of opinions and inputs and meticulously analyze them. It is imperative that the team members involved in the process feel heard.
2. Delegation
Having the ability to organize tasks, plan work, and delegate effectively to others are critical leadership skills. A lot of leaders in the making find delegation tough as they consider it to be more hassle than it's worth, especially in the beginning. They also fear the task won't be completed in the way they would like.
Effective delegation is a combination of skills in organizing, planning, managing work, and managing time. It encompasses training others to complete the task at hand, communicating the assignment and the required outcomes, identifying lines of responsibility and authority, managing the work, reviewing it, and offering feedback.
Delegating allows team members in the company to grow and work on challenging and meaningful tasks. It reduces the burden on you as the leader so that you can focus on other tasks. This creates trust with others and enables leaders to expand the scope of results that they can produce.
The best leaders know that they won't be able to be successful without others' assistance and that they require the help and support of their employees and teammates. Learning how to delegate effectively is a skill that all leaders need to acquire – not only because they cannot do everything on their own but because they have to develop the capabilities and trust of their followers to bring their vision to life.
How to Delegate Effectively
The first thing you need to do to master your delegation skills is to think strategically. For instance, it is important to pick the right person for the task. Remember, you should not delegate work to someone only because they have the capacity to do it. Rather, you need to pick a person whose skill set is right for the task and is capable of completing the work without help.
It is not sufficient to just assign tasks to people – you need to clearly explain what you want them to achieve. Clarify what the successful completion of the project would look like by identifying the final outcome and the timeframe in which it has to be completed.
According to Harvard Business School Professor Kevin Sharer, "you've got to have real clarity of objective." This involves being clear on "what does good look like" along with "the technique of measuring accomplishment."
For projects with a short turnaround time, set a final completion date and check in at least once before the deadline. For longer-term projects, set a number of goals and develop a routine of check-ins spread out between now and the deadline.
1. Interpersonal Skills
To thrive in a leadership role, leaders need to have strong interpersonal skills. These skills encompass the ability to interact and deal with others individually, in groups, and within teams. Leaders should know how to skillfully interact and establish positive relationships with different stakeholders, including partners, external networks, staff members, board members, clients, and vendors, to attain business outcomes.
Interpersonal skills go beyond communication and involve the leader's behavior and attitude towards others. It is the degree to which leaders can assert themselves constructively and appropriately, whether they can empathize with others and gain the respect of their team members, and how effectively they can resolve and manage conflict.
Leaders who have strong interpersonal skills know how to deal with conflict, stay respectful of others, and come up with win-win situations. Leaders should also possess teamwork skills and be able to collaborate and cooperate with others.
How to Nurture Interpersonal Skills
In order to grow interpersonal skills, you need to try to keep your interactions with others as focused as possible in the workplace, whether you're communicating with a team member, a mentor, or a client. Often, this means eliminating the possible distraction of devices such as mobile phones.
In addition, a positive outlook can help enhance your interpersonal skills by setting a pleasant tone for your interactions. Staying positive can even be an excellent way to support a growth mindset when you're trying to improve your interpersonal skills.
Lastly, you can also find a mentor with a strong set of interpersonal skills. Try to find a mentor who recently built their own interpersonal skills – whether by starting their first major leadership role or overcoming their fear of presentations.
The best mentor can equip you with the tools you need to build and grow your own interpersonal skills. The best thing is you can work together to track and accomplish your objectives.
Wrapping Up
Effectively managing and leading a team can be challenging, to say the least. However, understanding the most important leadership skills is going to help you focus your attention on what's most important.
Keep in mind that leaders can be the best technical experts, strategic thinkers, or innovators. However, if they cannot build strong teams, solve problems, delegate, or lack interpersonal skills, they are highly likely to fail at being successful leaders. Leadership is the complex art of achieving results through people and making the right decisions to propel an organization forward. Lacking these four essential skills lowers the chances of success in a leadership role.
