Develop your Leadership Skills
There are a number of broad skill areas that are particularly important for leaders. Today's demanding global business landscape is defined by relentless change and rising business complexity, bringing new challenges. Leadership skills provide career-enhancing resources and support you to be exceptionally successful in your career. Leaders need to provide direction to their teams and need to be able to make good and timely decisions to define and support strategic direction for the enterprise.
"The true mark of a leader is the willingness to stick with a bold course of action — an unconventional business strategy, a unique product-development roadmap, a controversial marketing campaign — even as the rest of the world wonders why you're not marching in step with the status quo. In other words, real leaders are happy to zig while others zag. They understand that in an era of hyper-competition and non-stop disruption, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special."
-Bill Taylor
Importance of Leadership Skills
Unfortunately, many leaders don’t have access to various tools and skills that can help them navigate through the complexities of today’s dynamic business environment. Leadership skills embrace comprehensive management and leadership, team management, decision-making, project management, personal productivity, creativity, problem-solving, and communication skills helpful in addressing career problems, and guide you on how to advance your career in a positive and seemingly effortless way.
Leadership skills can help you become exceptionally effective, be a great manager and leader, and most importantly be more successful in your career. Leadership skills when combined with relevant domain and functional expertise can transform your entire career growth and help you have a fulfilling career. Leadership skills are necessary for the further growth of organizational leaders at all levels.
Leadership Skills – Definitions and Examples
A strong leadership foundation ensures the following:
1. Accountability:
- Accountability means a willingness to accept responsibility for one's actions
- Accountability for defined work assignments
- Feels accountable for team tasks and responsibilities
- Defined ownership and holds employees responsible for accomplishing business goals.
2. Coaching
- Coaching gives the individual an opportunity to define their career goals in a realistic way
- Hands-on knowledge to colleagues depending on requirements
- Is proactively training less experienced colleagues
- Leaders should establish rhythms and coach employees toward achieving goals
- Should be able to drive an increased level of engagement
- Inspires team for a deeper level of learning
3. Teamwork & Team Management
- Ability to handle team effectively of different strengths including virtual team management
- Acts as an integrating and stabilizing team member
- Integrates colleagues proactively into the team
- Enables and forces exchange
- Effective project management skills with knowledge of project management methodologies, tools, and techniques.
4. Entrepreneurial Thinking
- Ability to see things differently
- Understands and knows the business strategy of his/her country
- Acts partly as a role model for entrepreneurial thinking
- Identifies marketplace opportunities and discover the most appropriate ways and time to capitalize on them
5. Potential
- Identified talent with industry expertise
- Talents are people who the company want to retain and invest in for the future of their organization
- Stress management and keeping your cool under aggressive timelines and pressures.
6. Analytical Thinking & Critical Thinking
- Effective Decision-making skills
- Problem Solving and analytical skills to analyze a problem and provide solutions to the business.
- Is very thorough in diagnosing possible problems and analyzing data
- Takes an analytical approach to problem-solving and uses root cause analysis
- Ability to think critically and come up with out of box solutions and; build sustainable and cost-effective solutions.
7. Motivation / Inspiring
- Coaching and mentoring skills to make future leaders from your team members.
- Hiring skills to ramp up an effective and successful implementation team.
- Mobilizes commitment and creates an environment that encourages and supports participation, creativity, and flexibility
8. Proactive Learning
- Thought Leadership to create value for business
- Highly proactive about developing and acquiring new skills, knowledge, and capabilities
9. Flexibility
- Time management and project time management skills
- Recognizes the need for change and inspires others to embrace change to drive business performance
- Is geographically mobile
- Emotional Intelligence and empathy.
10. Communication
- The most important skill required of leaders.
- Communication skills with the ability to present based on the needs of the audience.
- Presents to Senior Leadership
- Uses concise & clear communication
- Expresses ideas effectively in individual and group situations
- Adapts language and terminology to the audience
How TechnoFunc helps to build Leadership Skills?
TechnoFunc is providing you with free tutorials that help you learn the practical, straightforward skills you need to excel in your career. This is a free resource where leaders at all levels can develop the higher knowledge and skills necessary to address the increasingly complex and critical nature of their roles. These tutorials have been presented in the most understandable ways to help anyone can learn and use these simple processes and techniques to make the very most of their careers. This section contains more than 1000+ leadership resources including team-building, communication, and career excellence skills, to help leaders become more confident in business acumen, financial literacy, team leadership, critical thinking skills, talent leadership, leadership accountability, and change management. The articles and video tutorials in this section help you develop your leadership skills so that you can become an exceptional leader.
Browse specific tutorials by clicking on the leadership area of your interest. Click here to see the tutorials available under leadership skills.
- Leadership Styles - Learn more than 60 Leadership Styles
- Leadership Theories - Learn 30+ Leadership Theories and their practical applications
- Career Management - Get the Career You Want
- Change Leadership - Effectively Handle Change
- Communication Skills - Listen, Talk and Reflect
- Creativity Tools - Let Your Creative Juices Flow
- Decision Making - Lead Your Way
- Management Concepts - Build a Strong Management Foundation
- Problem Solving - Sustainable Solutions to Problems
- Project Leadership - Project & Program Management
- Strategy Tools - Strategic Thought Leadership
- Stress Management - Bring More Happiness
- Team Leadership - Build Effective Teams
- Time Management – Manage your time effectively
“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
– Jack Welch
Related Links
You May Also Like
-
In the early years, most jobs were skill-oriented, and with the development in lifestyles and technology, the current jobs are knowledge-oriented jobs such as management, accountants, design, or computing. Career paths encompass varied forms of career progression and this article discusses how we can build a fulfilling career? Learn here about career paths, industries, and opportunities for gaining experience in the field of your choosing.
-
Technology represents tremendous value if you view it from the proper perspective. IT empowerment also has its various levels in any organization. As a CIO or IT Senior Leader, you should try to move the technology function up the value chain. Learn how to transform your service delivery organization being looked upon as another cost center to a business partner that provides valuable services and brings competitive advantage for the business.
-
Stress is an essential part of our life. No one can live without stress. Stress can be beneficial as well as harmful. Stress as a positive influence adds excitement and hope while as a negative influence it can result in destructive feelings, anger, and depression. Although the general orientation to stress is to consider unfavorable outcomes, yet one must have observed that stress experiences may also facilitate the development of effective and varied coping behavior, increased personal resources, and lead to a sense of competence in development. Stress at a moderate level is not only inevitable but may be useful for physical and mental well-being.
-
Improving Skills & Competencies
Whenever you are looking for a job or having your yearend discussion with your manager, two terms generally referred to be “Skills” and “competencies”. Today success in a career is an outcome of having essential competencies and building required skills. Skills could be a major distinguishing factor for you to move up on the career ladder and jump from one role to another. Leadership skills when combined with relevant domain and functional expertise can transform your entire career growth and help you have a fulfilling career.
-
Discover Your Career Direction
The process of finding career direction begins with specific career exploration and identification of a career that could be passionate about, a career that allows you to make the optimum use of your talents. After identification of the career, you need to acquire skills and tools, and education that can help you get entry into your dream career. Learn the important tips that you cannot afford to miss.
-
Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. The best time management techniques improve the ways you work. Time management refers to managing time effectively so that the right time is allocated to the right activity. Learn more about the five steps for effective time management viz. study, identify, analyze, decide, and implement.
-
Importance of Technical Skills
Today’s business environment is complex and changing at a fast pace. Tough business problems require technical expertise to create cost-effective & sustainable solutions. All industries need some kind of technical skills to accomplish complex actions, tasks, and processes relating to computational and physical technology as well as a diverse group of other enterprises. The acquisition of advanced technical skills requires specific education certification or training, often with practical hands-on learning.
-
Understanding Corporate Strategy
Management outlook and procedures have been revolutionized by more and more innovations over the recent years. It is no longer possible to follow traditional approaches to develop your organization's direction, its management as well its effectiveness. Senior managers need to be good decision-makers. In this section, we introduce concepts for strategy, strategic planning, strategic leadership, their exact meaning and associated terms, and how to use them.
-
The best career choices are ones that match your values. Each person has several values that are important to him. These values are highly personal and knowing them provides a clearer sense of what's most important to you in your life and career. Career values are the beliefs you consider important from a work standpoint. Values help you understand what you want from a job? Explore a few examples of work values that can influence career path and job satisfaction.
-
Navigating your career journey will hopefully include a series of experiences that challenge your skills and abilities in ways that are satisfying and rewarding. Only you can manage your career. That means you must determine what things you are passionate about, what your goals are, both professionally and personally, and how much energy you are willing to invest along the way. Learn how to build an effective career path framework for yourself.
