Essential Leadership Skills
Leadership training is vital because the future of the organisation is only as good as its leaders.
All leaders should develop their leadership skills.
There are six major Leadership skills that every leader must master .
Failure to master any one of the leadership skills, results in less-than-the-best team performance.
The six skills are:
- Goals setting and achievement,
- Leadership language skills,
- Planning /prioritisation skills,
- Handling conflict situations,
- Self-confidence (self-control, self-discipline etc), and
- Inspirational motivation skills.
The six skills contain a multitude of subset skills that look like this:
How to you measure up to the six major leadership skills?
Score yourself out of ten for each of the following:
1. Do you have a strong sense of goal focus, or do you tend to drift?
2. Do you have strong communication skills, or do you tend to have trouble expressing your exact meaning?
3. Do you have strong planning and time management skills; or do you tend to not plan ahead?
4. Do you have the ability to handle conflict and resolve it quickly and without fuss, or do your conflict situations tend towards emotional outbursts?
5. Do you have a strong sense of self confidence, self-control, self-determination, self-discipline, and self-esteem: or do you lack confidence, lack self-control or suffer with too much self-doubt?
6. Do you have the ability to inspire positive emotions such as optimism, motivation, enthusiasm and courage, into the minds of others: or do you lack the ability to inspire others?
If you are strong on all sets, then you'll make an excellent leader.
To the degree to which you lack any of the major skills, is the degree to which you would not function well as a leader.
To illustrate, have you ever had a person in your life, who was meant to act as a leader, but who:
- Lacked a clear sense of goal focus: they were a "drifter" type mentality.
- They lacked good communication skills.
- They lacked the ability to willingness to manage time and prioritise, or delegate tasks.
- They lost their temper too easily and too often. Or
- They lack self-confidence or self-control or self-discipline.
- They lacked the ability to inspire positive emotions in others, or worse:
- They inspired negative emotions in the minds of the team?
If you have any managers or leaders who have these problems, then send them on our Leadership and Management course. We could help them.
Leadership and Management Quiz
Try our quick Leadership and Management quiz to discover your strengths and weakness.
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Essential leadership skills
In business, essential leadership skills are a set of abilities that guide a team to success. They include setting clear goals, speaking in a clear and positive way, planning work and time well, and settling disputes in a calm and fair manner. Without any one of these abilities, a person cannot claim strong leadership skills.
CG4D Definition
Context: Business management
Genus: Skill set
- Directs people towards clear, shared goals
- Uses clear, positive language to share meaning
- Plans tasks and time to move work forward
- Settles conflict calmly and fairly
Article Summary
Teams thrive when leaders master six key skills: goal focus, clear words, smart planning, calm conflict control, strong self belief and upbeat drive. Research finds firms that train these leadership skills beat rivals on growth and profit by over four times.