So, you’ve created your company… What’s next?
Building your business is your next priority. Trying to grow your business while managing the day-to-day operations tests your resilience to a whole new level as you overcome each hurdle and reach milestone after milestone.
As leaders, the overwhelm of running a business and ensuring that targets are met can be extremely taxing. This is why the vast majority of startups fail within the first 5 years.
Good leadership skills can drive and empower the team primarily in the tough times and are critical ingredients in organizational success.
How can you grow your business? Start with focusing on cultivating these
7 Remarkable Leadership Skills
1. Interpersonal Communication and Influence
As a leader, articulating your opinion in a manner that eliminates confusion or misinterpretation is essential. Also, knowing what to say and how to say it either opens trust and collaboration or dismisses and closes the feedback loop. Therefore, establishing a steady flow of communication is crucial in achieving alignment with the tasks and company goals.
Good leadership skills are founded on great self-awareness, people awareness, and cultural dynamics. To generate desired outcomes, leaders should spend time with their people to understand their personal motivations and goals and determine how they can arrive at a consensus in attaining the organizational objectives.
Effective communication leads to influential thoughts and behavior. A clear articulation of your company’s vision and strategic goals allows your team members to proactively contribute their ideas and deliver on them.
As communication serves as a passageway among your team members, clients, suppliers, and other stakeholders, it is important to be open for new ideas or innovations and even conflicting opinions to flow.
2. Teamwork and Delegation
No matter how sharp or inventive a leader is, a business will struggle to reach new heights without a strong team supporting it. Teamwork is the force that drives business success. It involves overcoming struggles and celebrating wins as one.
Teamwork enhances decision-making by allowing different perspectives to be explored during problem-solving. With good leadership skills, personal barriers to collaboration are dissolved, creating a safe space among employees to freely express their opinions.
A hurdle that some leaders face in forging teamwork is their fear of delegating. Often, they avoid assigning duties to other members of worry that they may underperform or underdeliver. A solution to this is to designate tasks for them based on their skill set while still allowing them to push their comfort zones.
Being a leader requires you to trust your team’s capabilities and allow them to handle the tiny details within it. Lead them in the areas where they lack expertise and let them feel valued by entrusting them with boundary-pushing work.
3. Strategic and Innovative thinking
Having strategic goals and identifying steps to meeting them provides more directly to your company. However, strategic thinking goes beyond that as it should never be a one-time, big-time approach. Instead, it is a continuous process of strategizing as you discover more opportunities or encounter more risks in the business arena. Practicing strategic thinking involves scenario-building and prioritization to arrive at the best possible course of action.
Innovative thinking facilitates staying relevant amidst the several product and service options available before us. Good leadership skills foster a culture of innovation by creating, supporting, and molding leaders’ teams to push forward. By being up to date with technology and continuously bringing in new solutions addressing one’s needs, you can gain a competitive advantage.
Related Article: 5 Most Crucial Team Leader Skills to Build a Strong Team
4. Coaching
Team members need proper guidance and training to excel in their positions. However, managers often set aside spending time and attention to developing their employees through coaching due to more urgent tasks at hand, without realizing that coaching is critical as it provides a venue for employees and leaders to achieve alignment on the goals and expectations concerning the tasks assigned to them.
As team members like to be challenged, leaders must set learning and development goals for growth. Career advancement and job satisfaction play a vital role in keeping your team members engaged at work which is why recognition of their contributions through praise or promotion must not be hampered.
5. Emotional Proficiency
Good leadership skills involve practicing emotional intelligence through self-awareness and emotional regulation. Since their beliefs, values, and opinions will be regularly put to the test. As managers are expected to lead by example, having mastery of their feelings and behavior will be beneficial as they communicate with their team.
A crucial factor in emotional proficiency is showing empathy. Sometimes, while trying to be efficient and productive, leaders tend to ignore the feelings of their team members and neglect the value of relationship-building. Just as leaders want to be understood by their team members for setting high-performance goals or accepting urgent customer requests, team members also seek understanding in their life situations.
6. Negotiation and Conflict Management
Remarkable leaders practice good negotiation skills to grow their company. It is achieved by being bold and persuasive in a respectful and inoffensive way. Good negotiating skills include listening well and looking for a common ground to arrive at a mutually beneficial agreement.
Conflict management is best achieved by dealing with the concern outright and not through avoidance. Good leaders treat conflict objectively and with confidence, seeking to arrive at a consensus.
7. Ethics and Integrity
Integrity is still one of the most indispensable attributes a good leader should possess. A leader acting with integrity can build a culture of trust, honesty, and transparency in the organization. While having high ethical standards expresses that a leader is unbiased and will play according to the game’s rules.
Leaders who possess ethics and integrity attract honest and trustworthy team members and deal with upright clients.
References:
Beqiri, Gini. (2021, February 16). 10 Business Skills for Success in the Workplace. Virtual Speech. Retrieved from https://virtualspeech.com/blog/business-skills-for-success-in-the-workplace
Cheun, Cheun Yeo. (2021, July 21). Developing leaders and the surprising whole-company benefits. BetterUp. Retrieved from https://www.betterup.com/blog/developing-leaders-what-are-the-benefits-and-how-to-do-it
Doyle, Alison. (2021, March 18). Important Leadership Skills for Workplace Success. The Balance Careers. Retrieved from https://www.thebalancecareers.com/top-leadership-skills-2063782
Time to take action.
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