How to Improve Your Leadership Skills
There are three essential components in leadership: communication, creativity, ability to motivate others, positive attitudes towards everything, and open-mindedness to feedback. And the thing about them is that you can’t claim yourself to have all of them in perfect composure. They are skills that you must develop until the end of the day.
Moreover, trying to advance one trait without the others is a futile attempt. All of those essentials must be sharpened together so that they can form into habits. Here is the detailed info:
Scrutinize People’s Feedback
It has become common in modern companies to exchange feedback among employees, especially between a manager and his/her team members. And if you have not implemented this method, then you definitely have to start it. But first, you must acknowledge who your subjects are. If you’ve just worked with them occasionally, you are the one who should call out the weaknesses in your character. But if you and the subjects have had some chemistry because of getting involved in many projects together, then leave the feedback paper blank and see if they have new thoughts about you.
And now that you have received the inputs from your colleagues, you can begin to examine the lack of your leadership skills. You should highlight the most prominent aspects and start improving from there. Any attempts of developing leadership skills without feedback won’t give you accurate outcomes.
Learn to Manage Crises
Crises happen when you least expect them. Then how can you expect the unexpected? Crisis management is an actual discipline in business, and you can start learning it by reading one of these books:
- The Butterfly Defect, Goldin, I. And Mariathasan
- Crisis Management: Change and Resilience, Sarah Kovoor-Misra
- Effective Risk Management, Edmund H Conrow
- Managing Crises – Rosenthal, Boin and Comfort
- Crisis Management – Tales from the Front Line, Caroline Sapriel & Dirk Lenaerts
The concept of crisis management is for you to be able to simulate the worst-case scenarios and tackle all of the unwanted possibilities. And it is not a skill that you can acquire just by reading because every field in the business has its own risks and crises. Therefore, make sure you keep detailed records on all the mistakes and messes you have encountered in your career. And play the “What Could Have Been Done” thinking on them.
Be a Realist-Visionary Leader
If you are that type of person who tends to the status quo, your ambitious employees will think that you are weak and lack vision. Besides, a leader is supposed to bring his/her team forward, not getting stuck in one place forever. However, if you embrace too much of your ambition, while you don’t have the resources with you, your colleagues can feel exhausted. They will also realize how unrealistic your approach is in business. And in both of those cases, you will lose your integrity as a leader.
Therefore, you have to update your knowledge of the strengths of your resources and team members regularly. When the time is right, don’t hesitate to raise the stakes. It can give thrills to your colleagues that will lead to passion eventually. …