Born to Lead?

To quote Somerset Maugham:

“There are three rules for creating good leaders. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

Why Should You Care About Developing Leadership Qualities?

• Promoting the wrong people is costly.
• Pursuing a career that is not in alignment with how you’re hardwired is exhausting and will eventually lead to failure.
• Self-awareness of your own leadership skills offers an opportunity to manage behavior.

Essential Leadership Qualities

Both nature and nurture are a consideration in developing leadership skills.  If you know what skills you don’t possess naturally, it can be instructional as to what leadership skills you need to learn.  Here are what we believe are the most important leadership skills to be learned:

• A Predisposition to Lead.  Leadership is a calling for the best leaders.  Others end up in leadership positions because they were good technicians of the work.  The very best leaders know that good managers are hard to find, and that leadership is the most important job on the planet.

• Receptivity to Feedback.  All great leaders listen carefully to what others are telling them.  They may not always agree, but they do consider what others have to say, and incorporate their feedback when appropriate.

• Self Awareness.  The best leaders are finely tuned to their own strengths and weaknesses, and know when they’ve made a mistake.  Poor leaders don’t ever think their wrong, and rationalize or make excuses when things go wrong.

• Other Centered.  Great leaders promote others rather than being self-centered.  They champion others work, and give away as much credit as they can.  This shows maturity and confidence.  “Grabbing Glory” and stealing credit shows weakness and insecurity.

• Trusting.  Control freaks do not make good leaders.  Great leaders trust their people, and allow them to make mistakes.

• Calm under stress.  People look to their leaders for cues in times of crisis.  The leader who remains poised and calm is the one who inspires others to do the same to resolve the situation.

• Superior Interpersonal Skills.  The great leader is highly emotionally intelligent and aware of others’ feelings and motivations.  The ability to inspire and change behavior in others, is the hallmark of a great leader.

• Decisive.  Great leaders need to take risks and execute decisions with imperfect information

• Balance of Values and Results.  A leader must insist on results, but also be very aware of how those results were achieved.  If you violate organizational values, or negatively impact people unnecessarily, you will fail as a leader.

3 Things to Remember about Developing Leadership Qualities

1. You can test for these personality traits.  Be careful when doing so, but you test people for their predisposition to the qualities above.
2. You’ll never find or achieve anyone who has all of the above leadership skills in abundance.  Hence the need to know how to teach leadership skills.
3. Self awareness of one’s own abilities in the above attributes can guide leadership development, but should not serve as an excuse because one or more predispositions are missing.

Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about Developing Leadership Qualities (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):

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