Leadership Development Skills
Being a leader is not be a title but a personal skillset which a successful leader develops. Leadership requires leaders to continually refine their skillset to deal with different situations. Leadership development programmes enable leaders to lead people with genuine authority within an organisation. So the title leader, does not make you one. Genuine leaders must learn how to lead their people effectively using trust and mutual respect.
Leadership development is an ever-evolving skillset. Leaders learn how to lead their people through different situations as their business evolves. As a business grows and develops so must the leader leading it. Successful leadership is about building relationships over time by being able to solve individual people and teams challenges.
Every organisation is unique, its nature, structure and most importantly its culture. These important environmental factors determine the leadership style a leader must develop and deploy to be successful. There are four core areas which leaders must develop as a core skillset. With years of experience in working with leaders from SME start-ups through to PLC’s we can develop a bespoke program to support leaders develop these skills. Like to learn more? Then drop us a line to discuss our leadership development programmes contact us just click here
There are four primary core skills which leaders need to develop in every leadership role, here’s a brief summary.
Self-Awareness Skills
Self-awareness is the understanding that the leader’s behaviour impacts upon organisational outcomes. Building self-awareness starts with self-reflection, understanding what impact you make within your organisation. How you make an impact with others and how to develop the impact you make.
What impact you make, with whom and why determines what you achieve as a leader. Learning how to build your self-awareness and how to improve that impact is an essential element for leaders to discover.
Communication Skills
Secondly leaders must develop good communication skills to engage and inspire people. Being able to communicate at all levels of the organisation, from board level to the first day apprentice is a vital leadership skill. Communicating information and ideas is vital for a successful leader.
Being able to communicate across multiple stakeholder channels to differing audiences builds relationships. Successful leaders engage with management and employees using a range of communication skills. A key part of communication skillset includes developing active listening skills to really understand what people are and aren’t saying to you.
Influencing Skills
The third skill of leadership is the ability to influence people through persuasion, promoting and delegation. Being able to influence people enables you to get things done and achieve outcomes. Influencing includes being able to communicate your vision for the organisation. Great influencing skills build individual and team commitment to change their behaviours. Successful leaders develop different approaches to influence different types of people through a variety of engagement tools.
Being able to influence people across and throughout a company requires using different techniques for different audiences. For leaders they must also learn to influence beyond their people through partner, customer and stakeholder channels. All successful leaders develop powerful influencing skills.
In senior-level or executive roles, influential leadership skills are focused more on steering long-range objectives, inspiration, and motivation.
Agility Skills
Finally, leaders must learn how to adapt, to be agile in their thinking about themselves and their business. Leaders must keep learning, leadership is not a static goal. Leaders must e open to refining and honing their skills learning new behaviours, attitudes and approaches to solve problems. Being agile and an active learner, is about being open to change. Learning faster than your competitors is a key skill for leaders to stay ahead of the competition.
Leaders must also keep checking the direction there are going. Being agile does not mean jumping around for one direction to another, but it does mean listening to a range of external voices. Listening to those who might challenge and not just listening to a narrow group of nodding heads.
Agility is about strengthening your leadership skills. Being able to step back, even from your own ideas and validate them using external voices.
Our Leadership Programs
We develop bespoke leadership programmes to support leaders develop their leadership skills. Enbaling leaders to be more successful in leading people and organisations. We support leaders improve their skills and capabilities to lead people through change, through growth and through the lifespan of an evolving organisation.
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Like to know how we can support you develop your leadership skills then drop us a line to learn about our leadership development programs contact us click here