There are fundamental leadership skills you must develop in order to be a successful leader. Without them other skills aren’t as effective as they could be.
There are a lot of leadership skills that you must acquire in order to be a great leader.
- Are some more important than others? Arguably.
- As a new leader, which leadership skills should you develop first? Let’s dive right into that answer.
Here are the leadership skills I believe matter most. Without these, leading others will be more difficult than it has to be. And let’s be honest, leading others is hard enough without getting in our own way.
This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list or an absolute law. It’s based on my years of leadership and training others through our personal development programs to be effective leaders.
Leadership Skill – Integrity
Integrity is a decision. As leaders, we have to decide we are going to lead with integrity. Thesaurus.com list these words as synonymous:
- Honesty
- Principle
- Purity
- Sincerity
Integrity is a soft skill – an intangible skill or quality that can be developed and modeled to others. For more on soft skills see this article, Why Your Organization Needs Soft Skills Training.
Leaders that value and model integrity garner trust from their teams because their teams see them as honest and sincere with no hidden agenda or manipulative tactics.
This soft skill is vital today because we see leaders that have let us down which can make it difficult to place our trust in another leader.
We can turn on the news almost daily and see people we thought were people of integrity break our trust. From celebrities, politicians, religious leaders, social media influencers, school officials, doctors, lawyers, the list goes on and on.
In the workplace as you lead with integrity, over time, your team will trust that you have their best interest at heart even when it’s not all good news and positive affirmations.
To learn more about the importance of trust see our professional development program, The Trust Factor.
Leadership Skill – Influence
Leadership is influence. – John C. Maxwell
The leadership skill of influence is hard to define. In the simplest of terms “influence” is the ability to move others to action.
Influence is a learned skill. Although some personalities have a natural ability to influence others, the rest of us have to develop it.
Do you know what your natural and adaptive personality styles are? If you would like to see what your personality traits are as well as which are dominant and what you would be best served to work on strengthening, you can take our free assessment here.
One way to gauge your level of influence is to evaluate how well your team is following your leadership. The more effective your influence, the more your team accepts your leadership and follows you.
To quote John Maxwell once more, “The true test of leadership is to turn around and see if anyone is following.”
Influence and manipulation can sometimes be confused as they are very similar. The major difference between influence and manipulation is your intent.
Influence has the other person’s best interest at heart while manipulation has your own interest at heart and puts the interest of the team as second or, doesn’t consider it all.
Influence is best employed with leadership skill number one, integrity.
Leadership Skill – Problem Solving
At the heart of leadership skills is the ability to solve problems. Not only your own, but those of your company, and especially the problems your team face.
I once had a young leader tell me he was very tired of solving problems every day. I explained to him that problem solving was a big part of the leader’s responsibility. Some problems were his alone to solve and some were his team’s responsibility.
Wisdom is knowing which problems are yours and which ones your team should solve. Once you determine that, the problem becomes figuring out how to get your team to solve some of their problems without consulting you first.
But no matter how you cut it, problems have to be solved and the leader must orchestrate it.
Leadership Skill – Communication
The leadership skill of communication is one I have written about before because it is a fundamental skill of great leaders.
Your ability to communicate with others is linked to your ability to lead. Communication is both the leader communicating to their team and actively listening to their team.
All great leaders are great communicators. Not only is communication a central part of leadership but if neglected, creates all kinds of problems that could be easily managed if there was clear and frequent communication.
Leadership Skill – Fast Learner
Leaders are constantly learning new things so the faster you can acquire knowledge the better leader you will become.
The desire to learn is a characteristic of good leaders but the ability to learn fast is a leadership skill that can be developed.
Effective leaders study how to learn quickly. They take courses and seek out information to help them acquire and retain information as fast as possible.
This can be everything from memory courses to speed reading and different techniques to level up on any subject they need to know.
Leadership Skill – Self-Awareness
Self awareness is a foundational leadership skill. If you don’t know yourself it’s difficult to lead yourself which leads to difficulty leading others. The first step is desiring to know why you do what you do. If you desire to know yourself, to become self aware, you’ll begin to evaluate certain traits you have and ask yourself why do I do this? This is true of what might be a negative or positive trait.
Knowing yourself entails recognizing your strengths and weaknesses. A good start to self-awareness is to ask some of those close to you how they would describe you. If five people all say something like, “smart” don’t settle for that answer because it’s a surface level observation. Ask them why they would say that to dig deeper into why they see you as smart.
At New Leaf Leadership Development we believe all personal development starts with self-awareness. If you’re a leader, part of your job is to help others become self aware so they can understand themselves and those on their team.
Take our free assessment to discover your natural and adaptive styles. It’s free and takes less than ten minutes. In just a few minutes you will be well on your way to becoming more self aware which will pay big dividends in your leadership skill development.
There are many skills that every great leader possesses, but some are built upon other leadership skills such as integrity, problem solving and communication. Start with the fundamental leadership skills in this article and the rest will come easier.
