Top 11 Self-Development Skills for Leaders

Posted by StevenHWicker on July 10th, 2019

Organisational leadership is a very broad field of study, encompassing numerous skill sets, each of which includes a multitude of individual task-specific management skills. Effective leadership also entails a wide range of leadership qualities, which are largely self-developed personal attributes. Learning all there is to know about it is a lifelong proposition. So, along your journey of continuous self-improvement, take stock of your progress from time to time, and identify areas of learning that have become priorities for the next phase of your leadership career development. Below is a look at what’s included in the general categories of necessary self-development that apply to all organisational leaders and a brief discussion of how to improve leadership skills in each of those areas. Recruitment Strategies Sydney

Start by choosing one or more general leadership skill sets for your self-development plan from the following list. Or, combine suggested skills sets or individual skills from within one or more of the sets from this list with areas for improvement that you’ve identified on your own, to include in your self-development plan.

1. Sales and Closing

Persuasion is the largest part of leadership. Therefore, the first goal of leadership should be to inspire — as that is the highest form of persuasion. Even the greatest idea needs its champion. For any mission to succeed, people must buy into the value of it.

2. Relationship Building

Leaders have a lot to accomplish. Turning your attention to the people priority can get lost on the endless To Do List. But, business goals and building relationships are not mutually exclusive priorities. On the contrary, financial goals are much more efficiently achieved through the power of strong, trusting workplace relationships.

There’s a difference between establishing shared goals and dragging people along and, in effect, coercing them to act as mere tools for helping you reach your goals, as if they have no personal stake in their own work. This latter attitude toward employees, even from the liveliest of smiling managers, dehumanises workers, reducing them to instruments of business utility. Shared values and mutual respect and support are the collective currency of good relationships. Successfully directing the productive force of these bonds to achieve a group’s common goals is a top-tier leadership quality.

3. Organisation

Excellent organisational skills are the foundation of the most highly-effective business leadership. Having employees and customers discover you buried in a horde of messy paper files and general office clutter is not an image that inspires trust in the professionalism or potential for long-term consistency in a leader or in an organisation. Setting such an example for staff is a dangerous precedent, which can lead to utterly chaotic environments that become notorious for duplication of efforts, missed opportunities, missed deadlines, excessive errors, undue stress, lost documentation, and general procedural ineptitude.

4. General Business Administration

To be most effective in organisational leadership, you need to be fully educated on how your business works, including how resources are managed, how your market functions, how each business unit operates, and so on. Acquire a solid foundation in general business administration skills, with emphasis in your area of specialisation.

5. Business Technology

Technology is the operational bedrock of modern business. It facilitates everything from turning on the office restroom lights to driving the integrated networks and enabling the powerful platforms that constitute the entire virtual structure that effectively houses all activity of the enterprise. Tech enables all your marketing, sales, services, communications, production, delivery, recruiting, and financial transactions. For conglomerates and mum ‘n dad shops alike, up-to-date information and communications technology is indispensable in the modern business sector. It enables you to operate in today’s digital economy.

6. Company Culture Building

A company’s workplace culture affects everything the enterprise needs to accomplish in order to grow and build a strong brand. A strong workplace culture impacts how employees feel about their work and how they believe their employer feels about them as contributors to the progress of the mission. Organisations with positive cultures help workers perform their best. Good leadership qualities are most apparent in the workplace culture in which team cohesion is strong.

7. Team Building

Strengthening team bonding increases efficiency of working relationships. Learn methods for actively working to forge bonds between team members. Provide opportunities for discussion, problem solving, and developing mutual trust and familiarity between employees, to help increase team and individual motivation. Practice encouraging sharing creative ideas, building workers’ self-confidence, and fostering innovative risk-taking. All of the above measures help cultivate the genuine team enthusiasm that increases productivity and quality.

8. Employee Development

Developing talent tends to be low on the list of many leaders’ more obvious priority initiatives for success, like launching new products or value-added services to promote customers’ success. Thinking ahead, even to future quarters, can feel like an extravagant gamble when that bottom-line, the benchmark for your own success, is glaring at you from the financial report. It can seem as if a trade-off must be made between focusing on shorter- and longer-term gains. However, that leadership perspective misses the reality that your ability to meet your major business goals depends upon your employees. So, making room in the schedule and the budget for your employees’ development is an investment your company cannot afford not to make.

9. Conflict Resolution

The potential for conflict is ever-present in any endeavor involving more than one person. That is why development of conflict management skills is a core leadership skill. True mastery of conflict resolution is among the most highly prised of leadership qualities. As a leader, your self-discipline skills serve employees and peers when you are able to perform as an impartial, objective and dispassionate arbitrator. Countless professional relationships are preserved by the sound guidance of well-prepared leaders in conflict resolution, while innumerable others end in unresolved workplace disputes in which parties did not have the benefit of such intervention.

10. Safety and Security

This area of necessary skills for leaders is not the most glamorous, but it’s the most important. Though we’ve placed it down the list, for purposes of the self-development discussion, it should really be first on everyone’s list of organisational leadership skills priorities. Even so, arguably, a greater number of otherwise high-performing leaders overlook this particular area of their most basic responsibilities than any other. The fundamental responsibility for ensuring safe, healthy and secure environments for workers belongs to leadership. Executive Coaching Sydney

11. Self-Discipline

All the development of specific business management skills in the world will not sustain a leader who does not practice self-discipline. There are no substitutes for a strong work ethic, efficient time management, appropriate organisation, and consistent follow-through. Habitually demonstrating patience and resolve are other key behavioural traits of the well-disciplined leader. Living as an example of self-control, adhering to sound principles, and consistently making good decisions is what it is to be a leader of the world’s highest order.