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Leadership Skills
These free Leadership Skills resources provide an overview of modern leadership, and some of the key skills, attributes and techniques required by leaders today. For in-depth hands-on coverage of Leadership Skills, we offer a comprehensive 2-day Leadership Skills Training Course
A person can be appointed a manager at any level, but he or she is not a leader until their appointment has been ratified in the hearts and minds of those who work with them.” John Adair 2005
What does this mean and how can you achieve it? You are already aware that management and leadership are not the same thing: that a shop floor worker or receptionist can be a leader whether or not they are endowed with the title manager by their organisation. While management deals more with carrying out the organisation’s goals and directing activity, leadership deals with change, inspiration, motivation, and influence.
Definitions of leadership
To lead people, you have to walk behind them:
Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher, born 600BC
In future leaders will be those who empower others:
Bill Gates, Chairman Microsoft and millionaire
Leadership at one time meant muscles but today it means getting along with people:
Indira Ghandi, elected first Woman Prime Minister of India 1966
Above there are three different definitions of leadership spanning both time and arena. They seek to introduce us to the topic of leadership about which a multitude of definitions can be found.
You only have to consider the great leaders of history to know that leadership is as old as time. So what is the current thinking on leadership?
By the end of the 20th century, team management and cross-functional teams were clearly best practice concepts. We were even looking at leader-less teams. In the 21st century, we have concluded that teams need leaders but not just any leaders.
This 5 point plan sums up the concept of leadership today
- We are ALL leaders! Everyone needs to learn, demonstrate and take responsibility for leadership in their organisation.
- Leaders need to know themselves! Unless you know how to lead yourself, you cannot successfully lead others.
- Leaders empower others to lead! Hierarchies are here to stay. But the best organisations will be those that empower their members to be leaders. And the best leader will be the one who is best at developing, listening to and empowering others.
- Leaders must be CLEAR! And communicate this clarity to those around them as clarity leads to confidence and confident people are effective people
- Leaders are compelled by the future! Leaders have a vision of betterment; they know what the future can look like. They must find ways to share this vision and enthusiasm with others.
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Posted by Colin Welch in Leadership Skills on March 20th, 2007 | No Comments »
Companies and organisations are constantly looking for new leaders, but how do you set yourself out from the pack and establish yourself as a candidate and potential leader? Here are some of the skills that you will need if you are looking for the answer to this question. These skills are covered in more detail on our Leadership Skills course.
Be dependable.
Leaders are people who are able to handle responsibility, so a company or firm will be looking for people who they can rely on to get the job done and handed in on time.
Initiative.
If you encounter a problem or an opportunity that is easily solved or something that you can handle then try to do it yourself without having to bother your bosses, they don’t want to be told of problems they want the project to go smoothly, so if you can show that you have the ability to think on your feet and have the self belief to follow through with it you will instantly grow in their expectations.
Respect.
Your employer will want to see that you are not only respected by your superiors but that you are also respected by your peers. They will be looking for a person who others will be happy taking orders from, so if you are not respected or liked well enough this will severely dent your chances of becoming a leader in the near future.
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Posted by Colin Welch in Leadership Skills on May 6th, 2009 | No Comments »
Core personal skills & qualities of a leader
Good communication skills
- Ability to expresses oneself effectively
- Ability to communicate in a way that encourages involvement.
- Ability to listen
- Ability to express ideas clearly in writing
- Ability to understand and interpret ideas clearly – received in both verbally and in writing
Good teamwork skills
- Has a good interpersonal style to steer team members
- Delegates decision making and responsibilities to appropriate individuals.
- Efficient use of resources
- Have influence to motivate team members to achieve beyond goals
Innovative and Creative Problem Solving skills
- Identifies and collects information relevant to the problem.
- Uses brainstorming techniques to create a variety of choices.
- Selects the best course of action by identifying all the alternatives and then makes a logical assumption.
Key Interpersonal Skills
- Treats others with respect
- Is considerate of the needs of others
- Values and encourages contributions of others
Ability to Manage Client Relationships
- Develops good relationships with both internal and external customers.
- Uses feedback of customers and implements action to improve and deliver quality services/products
Self Motivation and Direction
- Creates and initiates goals, timelines, deliverables, and budgets without support
- Is self-motivated
- Leads teams to achieve goals within deadlines
Adaptability and Flexibility
- Understanding of the necessity to change
- Challenges established norms
- Ability to make hard decisions
- Ability to cope in stressful situations
Always Professional
- Sets examples to others
- Keeps up to date with developments in the field
Financial
- Makes good economic use of resources
- Looks for methods to improve processes
Learn the skills to become a better leader on our Leadership Skills training course.
Resource: Assertiveness in Leadership
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Posted by Colin Welch in Leadership Skills on October 30th, 2007 | No Comments »
The role of leadership in management is largely determined by the organisational culture of the company. It has been argued that a leader’s beliefs, values and assumptions are of critical importance to the overall style of leadership that they adopt.
There are many ways of looking at leadership style (and probably as many styles as there are leaders!). You can learn more about styles of leadership on our comprehensive Leadership Skills Course.
Below is a four-point analysis of leadership style. Read the characteristics of each one.
DIRECTIVE leaders are those who take control, make decisions on their own and are self-reliant
COACHING leaders are those whose focus is to develop and empower others
INFLUENCING leaders are those who are confident in their own ability and who can influence others with their confidence
COLLABORATIVE leaders are those who create balance in the work place and work with and through others
Advantages and disadvantages
DIRECTIVE:
- Works well in times of crisis
- Good with inexperienced people
- Effective when time is an issue
- When you are the most knowledgeable
- Can appear over-controlling
- Doesn’t involve others
- Can stifle creativity
- Ignores the need to motivate others
COACHING:
- Develops people
- Improves performance
- Raises self awareness of staff
- Builds trust
- Can be time consuming
- Relies on others to work with them
- Assumes people want to develop
INFLUENCING:
- Mobilises people
- Can be inspirational
- Appropriate in times of change
- May appear manipulative
- Can be regarded as condescending
- May appear too pushy
COLLABORATIVE:
- Builds consensus and ownership
- Motivates people
- Involves others
- Uses others expertise and experience
- Relies on others involvement
- Can appear indecisive
- Relies on other people’s commitment
- Assumes others have knowledge
What type of leader are you?
Review the four definitions above and ask yourself the following questions:
What type of leader am I?
What are my greatest strengths as a leader?
What areas would I like to improve in my leadership?
How am I going to do this?
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Posted by Colin Welch in Leadership Skills on April 3rd, 2007 | No Comments »
“A vision gives meaning and purpose to your actions. It is the picture on the jigsaw box of life” Anon
Frequently, vision is listed as one of the qualities that effective and successful leaders demonstrate. It is often cited as the difference between managing and leading. Learn more about the importance of leadership vision on our Leadership Skills Training Course.
Vision is about generating ideas about the way ahead and, more importantly, being able to articulate these ideas to others in such a way as to secure their understanding and gain their commitment to what you are trying to achieve. One of the keys indicators of high-performance teams is shared vision.
A vision is not a vague dream but a desired outcome and creating it involves:
- Having absolute conviction about the issue, the project, your team etc
- Thinking about the desired future and asking yourself what it will look and feel like
- Testing out your ideas on people you trust
- Building a shared vision with the team
- Involving others in the development of the vision
- Ensuring their commitment
Do you have a vision?
How do you share this with others?
How do you inspire others with your vision?
If you can motivate and inspire others, you can take them along with your vision and they can play their unique part in achieving it.
A great deal is written and said about motivation and it is certainly a key issue for leaders to address.
Key strategies for motivating others
- Give staff a clear understanding of the context of their job and the importance of their function.
- Ensure that everyone agrees achievable personal development objectives and action plans.
- Give all members of staff a challenge so that they will feel stimulated and involved.
- Give inexperienced people more attention and provide on-going training.
- Delegate whole tasks to people so that they develop new skills and feel empowered and motivated to take on more
- Encourage employees to feel like a team by involving everyone
- Always give recognition and thanks to those who deserve it.
- Encourage employees to have high expectations of themselves and to see difficulties as opportunities not problems.
- Show genuine concern when individuals appear to be in difficulties at work
- Deal with unsatisfactory performance assertively not aggressively
- Avoid blaming
- Expect excellent performance – and don’t accept poor performance.
- Ensure staff have the time, resources and opportunity to develop the necessary capabilities to achieve success.
- Show you’re on their side by getting resources for them and working on overcoming organisational blockages.
- Make success visible – notice, appreciate, reward, celebrate and publicise success.
- Don’t ask others to do what you are not prepared to do yourself
- Lead from the front!
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Posted by Colin Welch in Leadership Skills on April 3rd, 2007 | No Comments »
Given that most organisations increasingly work to a team model, a manager’s role as team leader is crucial. The success of a team and its effectiveness is influenced by the quality and skill of the person who leads it. The value that a team and its work add to the overall success of an organisation is influenced by the role of the leader whose job it is to manage the team. You can learn more about how leaders influence and motivate their team on our Leadership Skills Course.
What makes an effective team leader?
As with all aspects of management, the styles used by individual team leaders vary. Some may be more task oriented (their main concern is to get the job done) or more people oriented (their main concern is to ensure that people work well together). There is also a distinction between being predominately developmental (seeing human resources primarily as an investment) or predominately conservative (seeing them primarily as a cost).
Leadership style was characterised in the work of John Adair on leadership in 1970’s; work which has been influential in this field ever since. In what he calls Action Centred Leadership, he sees the activity of team leadership as a trinity comprising:
INDIVIDUALS
GROUP
TASK
The ideal team manager takes all three aspects into account all of the time and achieves balance between them constantly. Realistically, this is difficult to sustain permanently! There will be times when there is a target to meet so the task takes priority and if you have a good enough relationship with your team they will be prepared to put in the hours until the job is done! At other times, an individual member of the team may need special support and attention or the needs of the group as a whole have to come to the fore. Thus your focus will shift depending on the circumstance but you must never lose sight of the other two aspects completely and you must bring the situation into balance as soon as you can.
Building High Performance Teams
All leaders want to build high-performance teams and whilst all teams are different, there are certain common characteristics which contribute to high-performing teams. They:
- Share and subscribe to the leader’s vision
- Demonstrate keenness to succeed
- Are motivated by their goal
- Members show commitment to each other, the leader and the goal
- Set and achieve challenging targets which are reviewed regularly
- Members have mature interpersonal relationships which demonstrate trust, openness and respect
- Get satisfaction from what they do
- Learn and move on from failure
How Appropriate is your Style of Leading the Team?
“Self awareness is central to being a successful leader”
Kouzes & Posner, The Future of Leadership, 2001
Understanding your preferred leadership style is important. It also helps to understand the effect your style has on others and when it is most effective. In today’s complex and changing business environment, it is more important to be able to adapt and vary the style to suit the people involved and the prevailing business climate.
Most of us will have a preference for one style over another so what is yours?
Basic principles of leadership
Leadership exists in all walks of life and at all levels in organisations. As a leader in any situation you need to understand these basic principles of leadership:
- Successful leaders have the ability to vary their style according to the context
- A more participative style seems to be most effective in most situations
- Real effectiveness depends on each leader creating and developing their own unique style.
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Posted by Colin Welch in Leadership Skills on April 3rd, 2007 | No Comments »
Managers and their staff spend more time in meetings than they did five years ago and, despite the use of ‘webinars’ and conference calls, they will probably continue to spend as much if not more time in meetings five years from now!
New technology is great and more and more affordable even to the smallest businesses, BUT its use runs contrary to the benefits of a group of human beings sharing the same space to discuss and decide together on outcomes and strategies.
As a leader you must ensure that meetings make the very BEST use of this human factor and if you are to be an effective leader, you must be able to run effective meetings. Learn how to run effective meetings on our Effective Meetings training course
Why have meetings?
In addition to the management role, meetings play an important psychological role in bringing cohesion to an organisation. Without meetings where you can meet others in the organisation, we would have less attachment to the organisation, a lesser sense of belonging.
Every group creates its own pool of shared knowledge, experience, judgement and folklore. This pool not only helps all members to do their jobs more intelligently, it also greatly increases the speed and efficiency of all communication between them.
A meeting helps every individual understand both the collective aim of the team and the way in which their own and everyone else’s work can contribute to the team’s success.
A meeting creates in all present a commitment to the decision it makes and the objective it pursues. Once something has been decided, even if you originally argued against it, your membership of the team means you feel obliged to accept the decision.
A meeting is a status arena. It is no good to pretend that people are not or should not be concerned with their status relative to the other members of a group; it is another part of human nature. When a group is new, has a new leader, or is composed of people who are in competition with each other, some team members will take the floor as a way of getting themselves noticed; this has been called arena behaviour and is likely to figure quite largely!
In a fast-moving business world, a meeting is very often the only occasion where the team or group actually exists and works as a group, and the only time when the supervisor, manager, or executive is actually perceived as the leader of the team, rather than as the official to whom individuals report.
How are meetings used in your organisation?
Skills for leading meetings
Your job, when leading a meeting, is to ensure the smooth running of the meeting, to enable everyone to participate and to reach the desired conclusion.
10 skills for leading meetings
- Ability to create a friendly, professional and motivational atmosphere
- Being prepared for the meeting
- Clarity of communication and encouraging others to be clear
- Structuring the meeting: explain the purpose of the meeting at the beginning, say how long it will last, what form it will take and so on
- Managing individual contributions :do not allow anyone to dominate and encourage participation from quieter members
- Guiding the discussion in a disciplined way to meet the objectives of the meeting
- Keeping people to the point
- Remaining impartial: do not participate too much in the discussion of topics
- Summarising the main points of each topic before moving on and making a final summary confirming the conclusions reached
- Acknowledging at the end of the meeting what has been achieved and thanking your team for their active participation
How do you score on these ten points?
Improving your leadership in meetings
Self analysis
At the end of every meeting you lead, get into the habit of taking time to reflect on your performance:
- Did you achieve what you wanted?
- What could’ve been handled better?
- What would you do differently next time?
Getting feedback from others
If you have a trusted ally in the group, ask them to give you feedback on your leadership. How we come across to others is not always the way we think we come across, so some impartial feedback is extremely useful. You can even ask the whole team to give you some constructive criticism to help you; if you can meet the team’s needs in this area, they are going to be willing active participants who are motivated and committed (so it’s worth taking the risk f asking them their opinion!)
Preparation
Before you hold your next meeting, ask yourself the following three questions:
- What is the objective of this meeting?
- Can this objective be achieved in another, more time/cost effective way?
- Who really needs to attend?
When you are clear on these three points, you can go ahead and organise a meeting which will be relevant, useful and motivating to those who attend!
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Posted by Colin Welch in Leadership Skills on April 3rd, 2007 | No Comments »
What is coaching?
The term and practice of coaching developed in the sports world and has been subsequently imported into the world of business. It has been argued that it is THE most important practice in which any leader can engage.
Coaching should provide motivation, structure and effective feedback. As coaches, managers believe that people can succeed, that they can contribute to their success and that they can identify what people need to be able to do to improve their performance. Whilst coaching may form part of the performance management process of an organisation, it should not be part of the disciplinary process!
Learn more about the importance of coaching on our Coaching & Mentoring Course
The coaching process
It is possible for some managers to be trained counsellors or appointed mentors, but ALL leaders can be coaches (and should be!).
It is important to remember that:
- The purpose of coaching is always to enable the individual to develop.
- It is not a control measure
- It should not be used as a substitute for appraisal
An employee may approach you for coaching but it is more likely that you will wish to use coaching as part of your people management strategy. If you try to force coaching on an unwilling member, it will not be very productive for anyone!
Ideally coaching is not a one-off but a series of planned interventions where you concentrate time to your member of staff for their development and you do not cancel or change the appointment except in extreme emergency!
Coaching skills
The basic skills you need for coaching are the basic skills you need for all people management:
- Active listening
- Questioning techniques
- Feedback skills
- Goal setting
A typical coaching session
Once you have the person’s agreement to participate, the coaching session follows a basic four-step process:
- Establish contract
- Explore development needs
- Suggest alternatives
- Set goals
Establish contract
This is an important step at the beginning of your first coaching session and can be reiterated at subsequent sessions. A contract in this sense is not a formal written contract but is a way of establishing the ground rules for your sessions. It is above all the time when you can reassure your staff member that you are not using the contents of the session for appraisal purposes.
So you need to voice the purpose of the session, your role and theirs in the coaching process, the duration and the frequency of the sessions.
Explore Development Needs
The ideal way of determining development needs is by asking what the person being coached needs to learn and wishes to address. You can then together agree what is feasible to work on in one session. Do not try to force too much on the individual in one go, for they will stand little chance of achieving their goals.
Suggest alternatives
When you are exploring ways forward with your coachee, allow them time to discuss their ideas. You may wish to give them some constructive feedback on performance already achieved if this is appropriate and helpful to them. If they get stuck you may wish to suggest other alternatives; options they may not have considered or may not be aware exist.
DO NOT impose these ideas however, or you are straying out of coaching; suggest them, and ask the person what they think.
Set goals
In the final part of the session the person makes a commit to themselves (and to you) of further action.
Encourage and motivate them to set realistic targets which are clear and concise and have a time scale attached. Remind them that they will be coming back to discuss the outcome with you at the next session.
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Posted by Colin Welch in Leadership Skills on April 3rd, 2007 | No Comments »
