If your goal is to become a leader in your company or field, you must step back and take a look at your leadership skills.
Do you have the relationship-building, decision-making, conflict-management, negotiation and influencing skills necessary to lead a group of people? If not, improving these skills should be number one on your priority list.
Checkout The Five Best Leadership Skills To Improve For Job Advancement
Here are the top leadership skills to improve for job advancement and why they’re so important.
1. Relationship Building
You’ve probably heard people say that they do not need to be loved to be a leader. While this might be true, relationships are still the key to successful leadership.
Strong and positive relationships with all employees create a more cohesive and engaged team, which leads to better outcomes for everyone. Building trusted and authentic relationships with the people you lead is something all leaders do, whether they’re “loved” or not.
Employees that have a good working relationship with their teams report higher levels of job satisfaction, are more productive, and experience less absenteeism, which is a positive for both the employee and employer.
So, while your goal might not be to be loved as a leader, it should be to be respected as a leader, which comes from building relationships.
2. Decision Making
Leaders have to make decisions often and sometimes, they don’t get a lot of time in which to make them. You must be able to make sound decisions with conviction and know that you’re making the right decision for your team or organization. All decisions, whether big or small, will have an impact on your team or company, so they can’t be taken lightly.
As a leader, you will need to have the strength to stand by your decisions even if they are unpopular. But, you must also be able to reflect on your decisions and change course if necessary.
Admitting you were wrong about a decision isn’t weak, but doing it because someone criticizes your decision is. You can’t let others influence your decisions. They can have input, but when it comes to making the actual decision, it’s yours and yours alone.
3. Conflict Management
On average, leaders spent approximately 24% of their time managing conflict. Whether it’s a conflict between two co-workers or a conflict between a customer and an employee, good managers know how to mitigate the conflict so that it has minimal impact on business operations.
When managed correctly, conflict can even be good for a team or organization because it can lead to stronger bonds. Learning to manage conflict by coming up with reasonable and effective resolutions is a major skill that leaders have that non-leaders don’t have.
4. Negotiation
Along with making decisions, leaders negotiate on a daily basis. Most of the time, their negotiations are on small things, such as project design or setting deadlines.
Some of the time, though, their negotiations have major and lasting consequences for teams and entire organizations. You must be a good negotiator to be a good leader. It’s challenging to take a group of people with different ideas and goals and come to a consensus in which everyone is happy.
Effective leaders must know how to arrive at the best long-term solution for everyone involved. They don’t have to have all the answers to all the problems that will arise, but they need to have the skills to negotiate those answers so that everyone feels like they’ve won.
5. Influencing
The ability to persuade others to adopt their ideas is a skill that most leaders have in common. This is known as influencing and they’re able to do it so well that the people they influence don’t even realize what’s happening.
Influencing skills involve things like honing your active listening, being able to communicate better, improving your assertiveness, being empathic, and critical thinking, among others, and the people who are better at these skills get more of their ideas into action.
You’ll know when you’ve become influential in the workplace because people will turn to you for suggestions and ideas on important topics and they’ll wait for your opinion before giving theirs.
Of course, your goal isn’t to make sure all your ideas are the ones your team adopts but to be sure your voice is heard whenever a major decision needs to be made.
Conclusion
Some people are born to be leaders, but even those people often have one or more leadership skills that need improvement. Taking the time to hone these skills can help you move your career on an upward trajectory so that you are closer than ever to reaching your goals.
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