What Leadership Skills makes a good Leader ?

It is always the Leadership Skills  and ability of the leaders to  handle the situation effectively 

When looking for a leading position for the first time, the range of skills required may seem frightening. There is, however, a general agreement among the leaders that some skills are more important than others. These are the skills you need to develop first if you want to become a leader – and most importantly, you want to be an effective leader.

In this page we have covered List of top  skills that make a good leaders. The first four skills are personal in nature and last 3 skills are to survive in today’s competitive business environment. In this article we have reffed many pages which we feel gives you better idea on leadership skills  and helps you understand the subject holistically in single roof.

Leadership Skills

 1. Confidence: Leadership starts with you.

Leders have immense confidence and belife on themselves first. One cannot expect other people to believe in you if you do not believe in yourself. This does not mean a blind belief in your omnipotence, in evidence, but rather in your acceptance of yourself and the confidence that you know what you have to do to complete the job, even through others. It is also important for leaders to show a positive and proactive attitude. Positive thinking – or the belief that you can achieve things if you think it is possible – may sound soft and fluffy, but it is a science-based and powerful technique for achieving success.

For more information on these areas, you can read our pages about building confidence and positive thinking.

2. Integrity and honesty

One of the important qualities of a great leaders is Integrity. This aspect of  emotional intelligence and includes credibility, realiablity and authentic to greater extent.

Those who act with integrity act in accordance with strong ethical principles. They have a strong moral compass and this leads them to act in ways that are generally agreed to be fair and just. They can rely to keep their word and are conscientious in fulfilling their promises. When they make a commitment, they insist on it.

One of the situation where good leaders exibits this skills is giving a constructive feedback . Feed back need not be always negetive it could be as smooth as suggestion and affirmative statements. Remember it is an art to giveing constructive feedback. Unless handled propertly it may hurt the other person moral.

We have covered more on integrity on our pages Ethical Leadership check it out.

3. Drive: Leaders are always motivators

Naturall leaders have a personal sense of driving and the skills they need to push forward changes and actions. Self -Motivation is one of the key areas of emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and use your own and others’ feelings to achieve.

It consists of these elements:

• Commitment
• Optimism
• Drive
• Initiative
• Persistant

We covered more about this essential leadership skill in our page on Self-Motivation.

4. Agilile : Change is the only constant thing in life

Good leaders will have to open for changes and its always start from the leader. The key to this is to be able to accept the uncertainty with open arms. Good leaders must also be able to help the organization and their team prepare

We have coverd more about this in  Change Management page.

5. Motivation

Every one needs to be motivated to work as a team, No individual can achive anything alone much. Good leaders are able to keep their teams going through both good and difficult moments because of their strong Motivation skills. Leaders understands what motivates people around them and make them to work in the envirnment and keeps them in office   They make every effort to offer an interesting and challenging job with a stretch but feasible goal for each individual.

6. Communication skills

Leaders must be able to communicate their ideas to others effectivly . Every other aspect of the leading is affected by the way they communicate.

Leaders must therefore be very effective speakers, and also possess a good skill of  listening and understanding the body language which is communicate more than the words chosen. More often then not  non-verbal communications speaks a lot , because often what is not said is at least as important as the selected words.

We have written more detailed in our communication skills and interpersonal skills which will help you improve your leadership ability

We have covered more detailed on how to get motivated and remain motivated in our pages on Motivating Team

7.  Delegating Work 

All the work cannot be done by leaders themselves, one has to know the art of deligation to effectivly complete the job in hand. A Good leaders will have a skills and know how to what and whome to deligate and get the wrokd done .

Here there are two important things one is getting things done in your way and also motivate other to do more for you with  a right controll is a  skill one has to master.Trust and confidence also play a vital role in deligation of work . Good leaders should know the team well  which will help to apply right amount of controll and confidece on the team.

One of the important aspect of sucsessful deligation is to right communication. Your team should be able to understand what is the intent behind the work according to the contex set.

We covered extensivly on deligation in our page Art of Deligation we are sure you will learn more in those pages.

Though it apears to be more of technical skills , without these skills one would not servive for long in the business.

8. Creativity and Innovation

In this copetative age no one can servivce without a innovation. To be considerd as a leader one should possess the skill of thingking out of the box solution. One may think innovation is not a leaders job but engineers. No innovation is part of new management, leaders has to think ahead of competation and come up with creative solution to servive.

Creative thinking invloves generating new ideas out of the box, or finding new solutions to exisitng problem. Creative thinking  applies to every area of business life cycle, be it sales and marketing or even in production floor the principle remains the same. Important thing here is ability to put them in to practice after reasonable tests. Key is to  ensure the new ideas work on the floor not on the paper.

We see many people with lots of ideas who never does anything than generating ideas none gets implemented, that is not an innovation. Innovatin involves taking calculated risk and practical approch, adoptability, willingness to experiment .

More about Creative thinking and Ability to Innovate has been detailed in our posts for your reference.

9. Problem Solving ability

Problems are part of every day life , be it personal or professional. A good leaders understand the siviarity of the challenges in hand takes right decision. Leaders must have a good decision making and problem solving ability, this is part of the technical skills which can be thought to certain extent however natruall leaders will have the ability to know the civiarity and complexity involved in decision.

Remember whatever the decision we have taken leads to

Decision making is part of our daily life

Many of us struggle to take decsions when we are in the cross road however you would have noticed some people make their decision on the go and most of the time they are right. They have a besic instict to take right decision and solve the issue in hand.

We have special page which talks more on Decision making ability and problem solving skills for leaders.

10 Strategic Thinking

This sounds more of a management isn’t it ?

Strategic thinking ability is makes what a leaders is. Leaders is all about how you strategies and design for success. In simple world strategic thinking is more of understanding where you are right now and where you want to go and how you want to reach the destination successfully.

A real leaders will understand the current possition to know how and where to reach by when, we all do this in a formal or informal way in varied situation in life. We simply call that as a planning, Strategic thinking is actually planning plus setting the process of reviewing and driving towerds goal.

This is the area where most of the young leaders are bit hesitant as they think this is area wehre one need to be really experianced , if fact they are right to certain extent that is the reason why gray hairs are still valued in corporate world.

Along with a good planning there must an execution and review process in place. Good leader will have these things in place to ensure they are on the plan and any deviation is made a note of and correct in time.

For more on strategy and Strategic thingking see our page Strategy in leadership

Culture of continious learning

Overnight no one becomes a leader, most leaders around us have a reasonable leadership skills wich is good enough. However a good leader accepts the fact that they do not possess all the skils to the perfection.  Leadership ability is a very dinamic and ever evolving. No matter what role one occupied they need to have a development plan to aquire new skills which are in demand for the cercumstancs. A good leader promots and exibits continious learning culture whereever they stand.