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Top 7 Tools To Develop Great Leaders

tools to develop great leaders

Top 7 Tools To Develop Great Leaders

It is not enough to hire leaders and hope they grow at their own pace. 

 

It is imperative that you also significantly contribute to their growth. Including leadership development in your business strategy has a wide range of benefits, such as driving employee engagement, increasing in overall performance and productivity, hiring and retaining efficient employees, encouraging embedded leadership skills in your workers, intuitive succession planning, allowing individuals to focus on improving their respective careers, etc.

 

Investing in leadership development is key to running a successful business or company. New and aspiring leaders will highly benefit from foundational  mentorship and training resources to harness their innate skills.  

What Are Leadership Tools?

What Are Leadership Tools

Leadership tools consist of skills and online resources that help to build and develop leaders. These tools adequately assess particular leadership, organization, and management problems. They are also crucial for communication planning, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, challenging task management, etc. 

 

Below we will explore both skills and tools that hone leaders out of ordinary people. 

 

Let’s look at some essential leadership skills first.

1. Innovation And Creativity

Leaders can benefit from creativity and innovation. You must be creative to be an innovative leader. That often requires collaboration, knowledge sharing, and risk-taking.

 

While creativity is mostly linked to artistic talent, anyone can build their creative muscle by taking on exercises that jog their thinking cap. In a workplace setting, that may take many forms, from taking risks to working on projects together.

 

These are ways that leaders can develop creativity and innovation skills in themselves and in the people they work with:

 

1. Give employees the time and space to be creative. Creativity doesn’t always happen on-demand. Sometimes, employees need time to mull over ideas and let their minds wander. Encourage your team to take breaks during the workday to brainstorm or Take walks outdoors for some fresh perspective.

 

2. Encourage collaboration between team members. Brainstorming sessions are a great way for team members to share ideas and build off of each other’s thoughts and help to surface different perspectives.

 

Other innovation boosters include being open to new ideas and change, fostering a learning environment, and managing for results, not methods.

2. Team Building

Leaders contribute immensely to the effectiveness and efficiency of their teams. The leadership will determine if a team will be dysfunctional or productive. One of the best ways to build your team is initiating and allowing your teams to engage in activities that promote teamwork and bonding. You will also build trust, open communication, and collaboration effectively. Leaders must be open to different opinions and perspectives from team members in the workplace and with their clients, ideas, markets, and talent.

3. Mentoring

Successful leaders are eager to give back to their employees. One of the best leadership skills is initiating mentoring programs that can effectively develop employees in areas lacking. This is also an excellent investment, as leaders will groom future leaders and prepare them for succession. 

4. Listening

A good leader should learn to listen to their team members in an attentive and empathic manner. And the reason is simple. Only enthusiastic and engaged employees can ensure the success of the business. Listening to employees encourages them to give honest feedback, report issues, say what’s on their minds, and make innovative suggestions for the improvement of the company. This will also equip leaders to take the necessary actions.

5. Motivation

A great leader knows how to bring out the best in their team. They promote positivity in the workplace, lead from the front, reward efforts, and provide their employees with productive work. Doing these will motivate employees and significantly improve their overall performance.

6. Communication

A good leader should always know how to keep communication open with their employees. Concise, clear, and persuasive communication is crucial in team briefings and discussions, presentations to the board, management, and liaising with clients. Communication contributes immensely to the success of leaders.

7. Strategic Thinking

One of the core skills a leader should possess is thinking several steps ahead, always seeing the bigger picture, and making plans and contingencies for the unexpected. This can only be possible by thinking strategically. A successful leader thinks strategically, sees a vision, and works hard to achieve it. 

Tools to Empower and Enhance Leadership

While these skills are essential, leaders must be aware of tools to access leadership.  These tools include but are not limited to:

1. Personality Assessments

These are tools that measure the work-related personality traits of leaders. As a leader, you must realize your strengths and those of your employees when working in group situations. For example, some employees are more skilled in more roles than others. When you recognize this and identify the strength of your employees, you will be able to assign tasks better efficiently. Several tools can help you do this effectively. 

 

Great leaders assess their leadership skills from time to time. You can ask yourself some introspection questions. 

2. Communication Technology

The world is evolving fast and in an era where working remotely is becoming increasingly popular, email is being replaced with better communication technologies. They include Asana, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. Innovative leaders prefer these communication tools because they are better. You can also add surveys to these platforms to get feedback from your employees. 

3. Behavioral Assessments

Leaders can use customized, work-related structures to correctly assess their employees’ behavioral competencies in the workplace. These tools accurately observe how people react to a situation. DISC is one of the tools that can correctly measure observable behavior. It will also correctly categorize your employees into the four personalities they fit into: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Contentiousness.

Final Thoughts

Successful leaders create more leaders and not just followers. Leadership skills can be developed and honed over time to benefit the leaders, their teams, and the businesses they manage. A leader cannot afford to stop learning. And one of the best ways to learn is to keep reading and undergoing training. 

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leadership women leadership skills

Top Five Leadership Skills that Shift You into an Iconic Leader

Top Five Leadership Skills that Shift You into an Iconic Leader

Leaders emerge from all spheres of life. Taking quick look at the most memorable ones like Martin Luther King or Bill Gates proves so. At some point in their life, they were ordinary men in society.

So, what catapults a person into the status of an icon. It appears the secret is in the unique leadership skills each one commanded. From Winston Churchill to Arianna Huffington, here are the top five skills you can learn from these exceptional leaders.

Creativity

Creativity is not top in many leadership programs as a skill to learn. But it may very well be the x-factor to outstanding leadership. It creates endless opportunities for problem-solving, goal setting, and motivating the team. To become iconic, you have to break the status quo and lead differently.

Coaching

There are many proven leadership skills that people have used over the years to achieve greatness. Yet, the one mark of modern leadership is coaching. It is the ability to help the employees do their work. Today’s iconic leader shows the team how to set goals, identifies areas to improve, create a plan of action, and provides motivation. The types of employee coaching can exist as on-the-spot coaching, mentoring, or performance coaching.

Building Teams

Modern-day companies are increasingly relying on teamwork. They find it essential to gather people with different skills and talents to handle the changing industry needs. Most leaders graduate into these positions. They join already existing teams without practical knowledge on how to build one. But highly sought-after leaders learn how teams work and develop through the four stages of team building- forming, storming, norming, and performing. They apply these to turn them into productivity machines.

Leading Change

The world evolves at an accelerated pace. That means organizations that don’t keep up lose out on new market shares. To move from ordinary to an iconic leader, you have to pick up on the trends and run with them.

Inspiration

The true mark, however, of a leader that impacts is his capacity to inspire. Inspiration is the ability to influence people on an emotional and logical level. Learning and successfully applying this skill relies on emotional intelligence, trust, and a strong vision. It makes memorable leaders because they are the people that create lasting change in lives.

Final Words

Here is the truth, there is no manual to becoming an iconic leader. You only have to learn and master leadership skills that set you apart. That is what will be your legacy.

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business ideas

5 Most Important Characteristics of Every Leader

5 Most Important Characteristics

5 Most Important Characteristics of Every Leader

Any workplace setting has a human capital element. All employees work for an organization but they individually possess traits that make them well suited for their roles.

Some understand the products and company procedures but may not have the other competencies for leading. These qualities here can help to distinguish those with leadership potential. Identifying these core characteristics of leaders can help to build future leaders within the team.

An Overview of Leadership Excellence

Over time, many leadership skills have been the baseline for defining excellence or inefficiency. The most important ones work for individual leaders like a well-oiled machine to accomplish goals. They also indicate how much employees look up to them. Most of these vital leadership traits such as goal-setting, effective communication, and strategic thinking can be learned and improved over time.

Therefore, not all successful leaders are born natural leaders- some leaders are developed. Research by Northeastern’s Master of Science in Leadership program concurs with the idea that leaders can be developed by the acquisition of knowledge through experimentation and observation in a professional background.

Effective leaders portray the various leadership skills in their professional and personal lives. They set a course for future accomplishments and inspire their followers to take action towards that target objective. In addition, they practice crucial leadership behaviors regularly to reinforce the positive influence of these qualities.

Good leaders guide their followers and make important large-scale decisions that keep the organization functioning.

In this article, you will find a breakdown of the five most important characteristics and attributes that every successful leader must have.

1. Integrity

Zig Ziglar said that with integrity, one has nothing to fear since he has nothing to hide. It is no wonder most organizations agree on the importance of operating on this principle in building trust.

A leader must be truthful at all times whether it is favorable for the situation at hand or not. Although there is no standard metric in employee evaluations that assesses integrity, it is an important leadership quality for the organization and the individual.

In the Center for Creative Leadership, integrity is specifically essential for top-level leaders who are guiding the company’s course and making numerous significant decisions.

Sometimes this can be hard when acknowledging mistakes, choosing safety and quality over reward, giving credit, etc. The best leaders do not just influence the internal public but also the external. Good leaders lead by demonstrating their integrity via their actions, language, and behaviors. When people realize an organization lacks honesty, they lose trust. For this reason, integrity ranks among the key characteristics every leader must possess.

2. Decisiveness

Decisiveness is the leader’s ability to make timely and clear-cut decisions using the appropriate amount of information. A successful leader should make decisions that are time-sensitive and well-informed.

While inclusivity is valuable, too much debating over an issue can lead to time wastage and settling on a partial decision.

In a working environment, decisiveness is essential for effective plan execution and goal accomplishment. Great leaders balance between the costs of gathering information, deliberation, and decision delay against the cost of making a poor decision.

Decisive leaders analyze these competing costs and weigh them prudently, especially during crises. Often some moments call for quick decision-making. Being in charge, the best leader dares to call the shot in emergencies. They do so with the knowledge that if things do not work out, they will be accountable for the outcome.

3. Vision

Every leader possesses the ability to see into the future and the elaborate steps that can lead there.

Vision is the leader’s ability to focus on the most crucial features of the organization, such as what the company wishes to achieve and the kind of leadership the firm desires to have. The leaders have the bigger picture of where the organization or business is going and share it with the employees.

How can you develop the company or business vision?

Great leaders come up with their vision by incorporating lessons from previous experiences to address present realities and prepare for future aspirations. It means he sets the purpose and direction by communicating it with clarity. A good leader must have a clear vision for what he is striving to achieve and how he will get to the objective. A leader with clear visions builds trust, inspires, and gets outcomes when they properly execute their visions. Finally, a powerful vision can aid leaders to enhance employees’ motivation and performance.

4. Humility

Humility is one of the rare leadership skills because it demands controlling the ego.

Although humility is a crucial leadership skill, it is an under-discussed and under-appreciated leadership value. While most can mistake it for weakness or indecisiveness, there aren’t more powerful people than humble ones. It’s a quality that shows confidence and the ability to see value in others without feeling insecure.

Humble leaders tend to be more approachable, willing to recognize the work of other individuals, and forgiving of mistakes. Only a humble leader can admit when wrong, accept input from others, recognize and give credit. People are willing to follow and listen to such a person.

Therefore, humble leaders are more likely to motivate others to work harder and share ideas than proud leaders. 

5. Cooperation

The true mark of a leader is in his ability to get people to work for him because they want to. The whole concept of leadership is about mobilizing a group of people to help accomplish the workload. The best leader recognizes he can not get everything done and cooperates with others by delegating the tasks. He can identify and work well with this team daily.

According to Forbes, cooperation is a specifically effective method for good leaders to acquire influence and lead successful teams. Consequently, cooperation helps workers to dedicate more effort and time in a cooperative workplace resulting in increased productivity and efficiency.

Conclusion

With good leadership skills, employees perform better. All existing or emerging leaders must learn and develop the necessary characteristics and skills such as integrity, decisiveness, humility, vision, and cooperation that can achieve results. Leaders with these characteristics motivate others, offer guidance, improve the work environment, develop morale, and initiate action.