Leadership Skills

Become an outstanding leader

Leadership today is very different from leadership in our parents’ generation. The old style of ‘top down’ management just doesn’t work anymore. Staff generally want to be fully engaged, and committed to what they’re doing. They want to feel as if their work matters and they want to believe in the people who are in charge.

Because of these higher expectations, it is important for leaders to know how to inspire passion and confidence in the people they are leading. When people work alongside a truly authentic leader, they’ll often give their whole hearts and minds to the cause. In these situations, a spirit of teamwork and loyalty can spread throughout an organisation, resulting in higher morale and greater productivity.

Leadership involves managing, coordinating and supervising, taking responsibility for people, directing, organising and motivating them. There is one leadership style that is appropriate in many corporate situations – the Transformational Leadership. A leader using this style:

• Has integrity
• Sets clear goals
• Clearly communicates a vision
• Sets a good example
• Expects the best from the team
• Encourages
• Supports
• Recognises good work and people
• Provides stimulating work
• Helps people see beyond their self-interests and focus more on team interests and needs
• Inspires

In short, transformational leaders are exceptionally motivating and they are trusted. When your team trusts you, and is really ‘fired up’ by the way you lead, you can achieve great things.

Some believe that leaders are born and not made. However it is possible to develop leadership skills. It can take years to become a great leader, but there are ways to improve your abilities.

• Improving leadership skills is not complicated; it takes passion and good practical resources. As a leader you have to know and learn more about human nature, what makes them motivated and inspired.
• There are many leadership skills training places where you can improve and help you identify the areas you need to work on and develop. Always try to educate yourself and never stop learning. Attend training workshops, seminars, coaching programmes periodically to learn new leadership skills.
• Self-esteem, planning, motivation, delegation and empowerment are all important in improving your leadership skills. The success of your leadership depends on the way you recognise your organisation’s needs and how you can adapt your leadership style to those needs.
• Become a good listener and be honest are very essential for improving leadership skills. Be more willing to listen than to talk, pay close attention and show interest in what your team says.
• Planning is one of the key management tools for improving leadership skills. The more information you acquire, the better prepared you will be to make decisions which in turn helps to unify an organisation by getting others involved.
• Always give clarified directions to your team regarding their work and performance by improving your communication skills. When information is given, a good leader gets opinions from employees, gives honest and impartial feedback regularly.
• Leadership skills involve with the improvement of having a clear vision of yourself and make others stick with your morals and personal values system. Making choices and taking actions that are aligned with your values helps you succeed almost effortlessly.

When at interviews, it is simply not good enough to say “I have leadership experience” to a recruiter or potential employer. You have to prove that you are by giving examples of when you have worked in a team and what you did to make sure the team achieved what it set out to achieve.

Think of an example of when you have worked in a team and then use the STAR technique to describe it:

S = Define the situation (Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with?)
T = Identify the task (What was your aim? What had to be achieved?)
A = Describe your action (Explain about what you did, what part you played in the team)
R = Explain the result (What did you achieve, what did the team achieve, be clear about what was successful)

This technique is extremely useful at all stages of the selection process, especially at interviews, so it is worthwhile getting to grips with it.