You might be offered a leadership role at some point in your career, but if you’re not prepared, you will not be able to hold yourself up to that role. To be good and succeed in the position of leadership, you require some solid leadership skills.
According to a survey, 38% of Australian employees believe that leadership and management are responsible for the growth and development of a business. Therefore, recruiters look for individuals with specific competencies and skills when promoting someone to a leadership position within the organization.
The top-ranking organizations look for individuals with well-developed leadership skills to fill in their significant executive positions.
However, the following questions still remain unanswered:
- Which leadership skills are essential to developing for a leader?
- Can people management skills contribute to succeeding in an executive position?
This article will help you get answers to your questions.
The survey findings divulged that 75% of Australian employees believe that Australian workplaces need better leadership and management. Moreover, you can study leadership and management courses to develop the mentioned skills. It will give you enough confidence to send your resume for a leadership position. You can apply for your dream job without worrying about lacking abilities on your resume.
Relationship Building
Specific management courses teach you relationship building with your team. This skill is the basis of creating a high-performing team. Some leaders believe you don’t need to be loved to be a leader at the workplace. While this might be true for some cases, you can’t generalize it since it is entirely subjective.
Primarily, your team members will perform better when working under cohesive and engaging leadership. So, if you want to be a great leader, you need to learn the skills for developing good working relations in the workplace. Then, you can leverage improved connections with your team to increase employee engagement.
While it might not be necessary to be loved by every employee as a leader, you definitely need to build good relationships with your team. This will keep your team highly engaged with one another, creating a positive attitude among all of them. Not only will this benefit you in the current project, but your employees will develop a sense of respect for you in the long run.
Practical Tips
Share Your Experiences
Whenever you get an opportunity to interact with your team, ensure that you share something about yourself or your experiences. This will help the team know you better and relate to you. For example, share the stories of experiences you’ve had in your career.
Write Thank You Notes
Who doesn’t love to be appreciated? One of the best ways to encourage your team is by appreciating their efforts. This appreciation doesn’t necessarily have to be in a material form. You can simply write a thank you note to your team members and let them know that their hard work is being valued.
Moreover, make sure that your appreciation is loud enough to reach their subordinates, peers, colleagues, and even your leaders too. This will also encourage others to show exemplary performance.
Perform Team Building Activities
When your team has strong collaboration, they can achieve more. So, good leaders provide their team members opportunities to plan team-building activities elaborately. Moreover, these activities will provide your team members with the chance to get to know each other better.
For instance, you can simply plan a family day with your colleagues or an after-office sports activity. This can be an effective way to bond with them. This will also give them the impression that you want to help them create a work-life balance and appreciate it.
Agility & Adaptability
Adaptability refers to the change facilitating ability. It is relevant today, too, since stakeholders bring drastic changes in business processes every passing year. So, if the leader is not adaptable, they will drag the company down. Therefore, the leader needs to be able to adapt to the business environment changes promptly.
A successful leader will have agility in adapting to changes. Sometimes they might even have to work against their comfort zone, but this would keep them in line with the shifts in the industry. Any leader who doesn’t make timely shifts may cause the company to be left behind. But, on the other hand, an effective leader can give any business a cutting edge.
Application
Respond To Change
To adapt to any change with agility, you must have a plan laid out to respond to industry changes. Outline all the steps and an attainable timeline in dealing with a policy change. Keep a check on your team’s progress on their change adaption.
Innovation & Creativity (Push Your Boundaries)
If you want your company to lead in the industry, you need to incorporate innovation and creativity in your tasks. Take the example of Apple. Their key feature is innovations that they include in their products while keeping the user in mind. This also makes their devices more user-friendly. To benefit from the innovation, customers are even willing to pay higher prices than other companies’ similar products.
To become a future leader, you need to forge your innovation ahead of the competition. This will turn you into the most influential leader like Steve Jobs is in the tech industry to date.
The results of a global study carried out on creativity showed that enhancing creative potential can lead to societal and economic growth. Today and in the future, creativity and innovation will drive executives. So, you can enrol in leadership and management courses online to learn ways to enable innovation and creativity in your job role.
Practical Tips
Schedule Time To Enable Innovation
You might have a lot to do in a day and hardly find time to think. However, it is essential to dedicate part of your day to thinking without interruptions. This way, you can organize your thoughts and goals for yourself and the team while also using this time to think of new ideas. As a result, your innovative ideas can improve productivity and performance.
Change Your Perspective
There are a plethora of possibilities and opportunities in the world waiting to be seized by you. However, if you keep looking within your four-cornered room, you won’t be able to do much. So instead, look outside the window and brainstorm with your team members. Provide yourself and your team members a relaxed environment to think.
Keep The Focus On Others
As a great leader, you need to accept that your team may have better ideas than you. Hence, make sure you listen to each of them even if they think it’s ridiculous. You never know. Any idea thrown out to you might just turn out to be the one you are searching for.
Employee Motivation
One of the significant contributing factors to a company’s success is employee motivation. It is as important as employee engagement. Sometimes even higher than it. So, as a team leader, you need to build a connection with your team to keep them motivated, and the key to achieving that is good communication. Even if they don’t engage so much with each other, you need to find ways to keep them motivated.
Practical Tips
Announce Commendations
When it comes to appreciation, make sure you do it publicly and let everyone know your employee’s achievements. No good work should go by unacknowledged. Hence, doing this can significantly boost employee motivation.
Decision-Making
Being in an authoritative position, you need to make tough decisions almost all the time. So, in order to be an exemplary leader, you require top-notch decision-making skills. Whether big or small, any decision should be taken with sound, solid, and rational thought to produce the best results. This is why decision-making is the key point of any executive’s job description.
Your decisions will determine the success or failure of your organization. Hence you need to be thorough and confident in your choices. Take the input of people who will be involved in the after-effects of your decision to increase its effectiveness. Sometimes your decision won’t even be well-liked by others, but you have to take it for the more significant good.
Practical Tips
Define Your Values
Your personal and organizational values should be aligned. That will motivate you to work for them and help them grow. Otherwise, if your work ethics and the organization’s core values don’t meet at any point, you won’t be able to make the decision that the organization wants you to.
Understand Your Organization’s Values.
Get an in-depth understanding of an organization’s values and what it stands for. This will help you in making decisions that adhere to their values. Hence, your decision should reflect the company’s core values.
Apply Both Your Personal And Organization’s Values
An effective decision is made while keeping the combination of personal and organizational value in sight. Once you build a connection between both sets of values, you can streamline your decision-making process. This will help you make sound decisions in even high-stress situations. Just remember the non-negotiable factors for yourself and your organization.
Wrapping Up
A college degree and a few technical skills only take you to a certain level. Going further than that will require leadership skills that are best attained through leadership and management courses. Develop necessary soft skills such as being a good listener and communicator to be effective as a leader.
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