Whether you're a business owner, manager, or an aspiring manager or leader, developing your leadership skills and ability is going to help you, your career, and those around you. So let's get started with the four qualities of a good leader and how to develop them:
1. Self-Awareness
- Be clear about what your strengths are and the areas in which you lack skills. Despite what we may think, it's not possible to be good at everything. You won't have all the answers, but that is not a sign of weakness
- Learn how to manage stress effectively
- Look after your well-being and needs
2. Seeking self-improvement, especially in communication skills
- Seek mentorship
- Encourage constructive feedback
- Get training in areas where you need to upskill
- Be prepared to fail and learn from it.
- Mistakes happen and failure isn't permanent. It's an opportunity to learn how to do things better.
- Have pre-planned strategies to help minimise risk and stress
3. Knowing your "WHY"
- Know your "WHY" and how to enthuse staff to share your passion and vision
- You want people working together for a common cause, not just turning up for the pay-cheque
- Hire people who believe what you believe. They will work for you with blood, sweat and tears
- By encouraging your team to engage in your "WHY" they will bring their passion, creativity and interactivity
4. Developing Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
- Be genuine. Be humble. Be aware of others
- Get rid of self-doubt. You don't have to be the best at everything. That's why you have staff
- Develop self-confidence so that you can effectively delegate and communicate
- Learn to listen
- Be consistent
- Be present and approachable
- Stay calm in all events.Even when things don't go to plan, it's an opportunity for self development.
Lisa Martin, Founder and Executive Director of GoFi8ure describes a good leader as the following:
"A good leader is someone who can positively influence others' behaviour to increase productivity and efficiency."
So how do you encourage such behaviours? A good leader needs to be able to stand back and let others shine. If your direct report has worked hard and created something valuable, you should let them have the spotlight. Not only does it make you look good (people will notice when you do this), but recognition also motivates staff and rewarding their behaviour (hard work) acts as positive enforcement.
EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is also paramount in a truly great leader. While many people try to work their way up to managerial roles, only those with high EQ will be admired, well respected and an inspiration to those they lead. EQ is even seen by many as being more important that IQ once you have entered the workplace:
"In fact, emotional intelligence—the ability to, say, understand your effect on others and manage yourself accordingly—accounts for nearly 90 percent of what moves people up the ladder when IQ and technical skills are roughly similar." Blog written by Laura Wilcox of Harvard Extension School
What is EQ and how can you improve it?
"EQ is your ability to understand other people, what motivates them and how to work cooperatively with them" according to H.Gardner, Influential Harvard theorist.
There are five main elements of EQ:
1. Self–awareness.
This is being aware of your own emotions and feeling confident in yourself, your thoughts, actions and principles.
2. Self regulation
This is gaining control of your emotions through techniques like meditation, or having a positive outlook. It's also recognising the emotions you are experiencing, then choosing how you are going to express these and how you respond to feeling certain emotions, such as anger.
3. Motivation
This is partly to do with optimism and outlook, but can be improved by recasting things in a positive light and picturing a positive outcome.
4. Empathy
The big one! Empathy is hard to learn or fake, but makes an enormous difference in your relationship with other people. It's the ability to put yourself in the other person's shoes, and see where they're coming from. Having this makes it more likely you'll have positive interactions with people and not rub them the wrong way.
5. Social and communication skills
While you don't need people skills to excel, you will certainly make it further and faster if you have them. These days there are hardly any jobs where interpersonal skills and communication aren't high up on the list of requisites. With the shift from cubicles and closed offices to open-plan layouts and collaborative thinking came the need to be able to work well in teams and to work more closely with others than we had seen before.
