Companies can only succeed and continue to thrive when they have quality leadership at all levels. Businesses need to nurture their employees and provide them with various opportunities to develop and grow important leadership skills.
Why? Because strong leadership capabilities enable employees to be more productive and engaged in the workplace. In fact, studies show that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.
Good leadership skills can improve managers’ competencies and help them lead their team in the right direction. Read on to find the top leadership skills your employees must possess to grow as a leader.
What are Leadership Skills?
Leadership skills are the abilities and strengths that help people to oversee projects and processes. These skills also allow leaders to steer their employees in the right direction to achieve various goals.
Building the right set of skills enables leaders to bring out the best in themselves, their peers, and their team members. Leadership skills ensure a manager can achieve goals, mitigate conflicts, encourage new initiatives, and motivate their team to perform at the highest level.
Top 8 Leadership Skills for Workplace Success
Leaders must continuously expand their capabilities and build new skills to positively impact the work culture. Here are the most important leadership skills your employees should start to develop and why they are so essential.
1. Communication
Communication skills are critical for a team’s success. With studies finding that only 55% of employees feel their managers communicate and are transparent with the team, it is more imperative than ever for leaders to have excellent communication capabilities. After all, leaders are meant to motivate others to follow them, and that’s only possible when they know how to communicate with their team members, peers, and managers
With strong communication skills, managers can clearly and concisely communicate goals, tasks, expectations, and various organizational needs to their team. They can also provide clear and constructive feedback to their employees. This requires leaders to ensure they have their communication skill set includes adaptable communication styles, active listening, clarity, transparency, and empathy.
2. Strategic Thinking
Thinking strategically requires leaders to take on a broad view of the tasks at hand. By improving strategic thinking skills, leaders learn to resolve a range of challenges, while keeping their short and long term goals in mind. They learn to rely on solid data rather than just instincts to make informed decisions that will benefit their team and your organization.
3. Problem Solving
When there is a problem, people turn to their leadership for solutions. The leaders you are training need to know how to think outside the box. They should know how to dissect a problem and look at possible solutions from various angles.
In addition to mastering the art of problem solving, leaders should also know how to guide teammates through the strategic thinking process instead of automatically fixing every issue that arises. The best problem solvers rely on logic, creativity, and determination to get the job done.
4. Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is an essential soft skill. Managers need to have a better understanding of what employees may be thinking or experiencing in specific scenarios to make decisions that support the team.
Emotional intelligence enables leaders to better understand, reason with, and manage the emotions of themselves and others. Those who are skilled in this area can reduce conflict, often before it even begins.
5. Relationship Building
Here is another soft skill that leaders need to develop. The more comfortable employees are with the leader, the more vocal they will be about their concerns. Besides building relationships with team members, leaders also need to interact with other stakeholders to collaborate and build a strong network.
This leadership skill is not about becoming best friends with everyone at work, of course. Instead, it’s about developing, healthy and respectful relationships among everyone.
6. Negotiation
Effective negotiation is central to leadership. Negotiation skills help to create stronger relationships and show both empathy and fairness. It also shows employees and colleagues that a leader is willing to work with them regarding various issues.
7. Team Motivation
Leaders need to inspire their workers to go above and beyond. It is crucial to learn how to offer extrinsic motivation and offer positive feedback to the team. Managers should make employees feel valued and appreciated by highlighting their achievements on a social platform.
Salaries should only be part of the way employees are encouraged. Proper motivation and inspiration from the leaders are essential to ensure employees are more involved and feel less isolated at the workplace
8. Agility and Adaptivity
The business world changes rapidly, and not everyone knows how to keep up with those changes. Learning to be more adaptable is an essential skill for leaders, so they can roll with any changes that might occur.
How to Ensure Your Employees Build the Right Leadership Skills
Below are five surefire ways of developing leadership skills for the team. Training employees to be leaders helps to make them feel valued. This leads to greater loyalty to the company, as well as more engagement. It also helps with employee retention.
Assign Stretch Projects
These are projects or tasks that are currently somewhat beyond a person’s skill level or knowledge.By providing them scenario-based assignments leaders can demonstrate problem-solving, strategic thinking, and communication skills by handling various challenging situations.
This will also expand their skills and confidence, helping to make them more effective leaders.
Be a Mentor and offer feedback
Good leadership skills don’t develop in a vacuum. In addition to training via developmental courses, mentorship is also necessary. Listen to your employees, provide them feedback, and help them be a better mentor to their team. Guide them, but don’t do everything for them.
Self-Directed Learning
Your employees should be encouraged to continue learning. By providing them with quality resources, they can engage in leadership training at their own pace and time. Leverage a Learning Experience Platform (LXP) that can help deliver flexible, self-paced digital programs on leadership and management effectiveness. Moreover, by tapping into the AI-based recommendations of the LXP, you can personalize learning and motivate leaders to learn at their own pace.
Encourage Independent Thinking
Through independent, creative thinking, your employees can develop solutions that improve processes. They learn to work without guidance, so they begin to feel more comfortable making decisions for themselves and their team.
Emphasize Personal Growth
Encourage growth beyond just what’s offered through your workplace. Highlight the importance of personal growth in and outside of work. It can empower your people to produce better results, meet goals, and become stronger and more well-rounded employees.
Strengthen Your Company with Better Leaders
To help your employees succeed, provide continuous learning and leadership courses with impactful learning technology . A learning experience platform like Disprz LXPis an effective learning tool that can help you deliver high-quality learning experiences to your workforce and improve their leadership skills..
Disprz LXP can help you identify the trending leadership skill and build impactful learning journey to build the skill gap. Moreover, through AI-based recommendation, you can ensure continuous learning.
Learn more about how our LXP can make a beneficial difference for your company. Request a demo to see how it can work for you.
Original Article: 8 Leadership Skills to Drive Workforce Performance (disprz.com)
Coreen Menezes, Disprz
