How To Develop Your Leadership Skills
How To Develop Your Leadership Skills
To run an office, factory, organization and even your home efficiently, you need excellent leadership skills. A good leader owns skills of influencing people to accomplish a certain objective. We always wish to inspire and lead people around us but just by wishing, one cannot achieve it. Some people have such skills naturally in them but there are ways to develop certain skills to become an inspirational leader. Following are some useful and practical steps of how to develop your leadership skills?
Active and Energetic
To be an influential leader, the first quality you need is to be “active and energetic”. A lazy and irresponsible person can never be a leader. People tend to follow their leaders, if the leader is lethargic and sluggish then how he/she can influence people around him/herself to accomplish certain goals? So, always be active, energetic and quick in response.
Optimism
This is another quality which a makes a person successful leader. In the time of downfall, a good leader never loses hope. He knows that downfalls come to teach something new and good. He never becomes pessimistic, his eyes sees the success after defeat. He not only himself remains optimistic and motivated but also keeps his subordinates motivated. If we look in history all great leaders like Nelson Mandela, faced downfalls but in this situation they remained optimistic and motivated their followers and at the end they achieved their goals.
Communication Skills
This skill does wonders, many in history, conquered the heart of people just with their communication skills. In Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, ruled the hearts of people just by his excellent communication skills. So, know the magic of words. Learn the art of using right words at right time. Never exaggerate; it will lead you to lose your trust over others. Be polite, brief and accurate in communication. So that, an exact message is conveyed to others and you are not misunderstood.
Flexible towards Change
Our world is very dynamic; it keeps on changing every minute and every second. Develop your skill of seeing the future. Learn about new researches and changes. Be flexible towards change. Rigid and orthodox type leaders tend to fail in long run. If you belong to a business field, learn about new researches and theories. Implement new ways of doing business. If you stick to the old style of doing business, one day, you will be out of the market.
Decision Making
Decision making is the most significant skill of a successful leader. A brilliant leader never gets confused. He happens to be very clear in his vision and objectives. Taking decisions is one thing but taking decisions at right time is very crucial. A good leader knows that he can make mistakes while taking certain decisions so, if things go wrong, he owns the responsibility. You cannot develop decision making skill overnight; it polishes with practice and experience.
Ignore Mistakes of others
We all tend to make mistakes. Some mistakes are ignorable and some are not. This is the skill of a good leader to know where he should ignore and where he should punish. If you tend to punish on every mistake it will give an impression of rigidness but if you tend to ignore always, people will start taking you for granted. So, develop the skill of being balance.
Self-Accountability
As I said, we all tend to mistakes. Similarly, leader also tends to mistakes but an intelligent and smart leader always does self-accountability; never let others to point finger on him. He keeps an eye on his actions and decisions, analyzes his weaknesses and strengths and makes plans accordingly. A witty leader learns from his mistakes and avoids repeating them.
Identify the abilities of others
A brilliant leader has the skills of analyzing and identifying the abilities of his sub-ordinates. This is for sure that every person is not equal, some persons tend to be more active, intelligent and witty but some are not. This depends upon a leader’s leadership skills that how he polishes the abilities of his subordinates and get along with his weak candidates; so that they do not get ignored and left behind.
Comments
Useful tips, but the article lacks authority. Why are the tips useful? Have you used them? Where is the summary paragraph? What is your source for this information?
- Author
@davenmidtown: These tiips are useful because I practiced them i my real life. I learnt these tips from my father and teachers. my father always advice me to be breif and accurate in your communication and never exaggerate. during my MBA, with the help of my teachers I learnt how to influence and lead; we always used to work in group, in this way we polished our leadership skills. this is my source.
I must say these are not the all tips but are very important one and these skills come through practice and experience.
thank you very much for stopping by and providing me your valuable feedback.
These tips are basic, but lack the steps to really integrate them into action. I do agree with the bulk of this advice but there is so much more to learn. Examples would be helpful and real life scenarios would add credence to these tips.
These are excellent tips. There are some leaders that never aquire these skills. Every manager should read this hub. Very well written.
@ uzma... thank you for clarifying... I would like to see you include in your article some aspects of your response to me. It would take your article from being kind of sterile and give it life... I would also encourage you to keep writing, but include a bit of humanity into your work.
- Author
@thatchjl: thank you for your comment. I agree with your points. leadership is not something which can be acheived overnight, this need a lot of practice and experience.thaks again.
- Author
@Tammyswallow: I am really very thankful to you for your sweet and encouraging feedback.
- Author
@Devinmedtown: I am so gratefull to you for your valuable suggestions. I will try to improve and love to hear more from your side.thank you again.
Another leadership skill that should fall into the accountability arena is being able to hold employees accoutable for unfavorable outcomes. One comparative that I have used is that most adult with children would do almost anything for that child. However when that child breaks a rule accountability for their actions must happen or we as parents would fail to teach a principle to our kids. Great article thanks for posting it.
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