No matter your job or role in your community, learning how to develop leadership skills is a crucial part of personal growth.
The strength of your skills as a leader has a direct impact on your career, your relationships, and your ability to be a positive influence on others. As social scientist and best-selling author Joseph Grenny puts it, leaders are natural influencers, and have a unique ability to enact sustainable change within and around them.
Of course, experiencing life change is what our men’s groups are all about. And because we all need to grow as leaders, we thought it would be helpful to talk about how you can develop these skills in your everyday life.
Here’s what to know about developing leadership skills, with helpful tips that you can use in and out of your job.
Why Leadership Development Skills Matter
We don’t all hold leadership positions at work, but that doesn’t mean we don’t all have ample opportunities to be leaders in our day-to-day lives.
The development of leadership skills is essential for growth in your career and your relationships. Beyond that, it can have a direct and profound impact on your ability to heighten your own emotional intelligence.
In a blog post titled “Improving Leadership and Performance to the Next Level,” leadership expert Dr. Henry Cloud talks about the many positive outcomes we can achieve. Ultimately, he says, the active pursuit of leadership skills is connected to curiosity and a willingness to get out of our comfort zone. And these things are a must if you’re going to reach new levels of personal and professional growth.
How to Improve Leadership Skills in the Workplace
There are two types of leadership skills to focus on improving in the workplace: hard leadership skills, such as decisiveness and the ability to manage people and projects, and soft leadership skills, such as empathy, patience, and adaptability.
Seeking out activities to improve leadership skills will naturally help you develop both your hard and soft skills—though you can certainly pick and choose the activities you do based on the specific skills you’re targeting. Self-help speaker and author Tony Robbins recommends doing an honest assessment of your existing leadership skills and style. Once you have a better sense of your strengths and weaknesses, you can be sure to focus on areas that will make the biggest difference in your own path to improvement.
As for the activities themselves, Robbins also has various tips for things that will support you in developing leadership skills. Here’s a quick breakdown of the basics:
- Act like a leadership role model. Fake it until you make it, right? Walk the walk and talk the talk of great leadership as if you’ve already achieved the skills you want. Over time, these actions and behaviors will become second nature and less out of your comfort zone.
- Focus on leadership weaknesses and strengths. The point of doing an assessment of your current leadership skills is to identify where you need to improve, but also where you’re already doing great. Work to amplify both, and consider the ways that your strengths can be used to boost your confidence and abilities.
- Set clear benchmarks for improvement. Set out concrete goals and benchmarks for achieving them. For example, if your goal is to get better at active listening, set benchmarks like maintaining more consistent eye contact, giving off more positive body language, not interrupting others when they’re speaking, and acknowledging when you’ve met them.
- Be open to admitting failure. As with most things worth doing, the path to leadership improvement is not a straight line. Failure is normal, and can be a great learning experience for moving forward.
Improving your leadership skills can help you become the best version of yourself, providing you with the confidence and ability to influence others positively. At Unravel, we’re here to support you on this journey, and we encourage you to contact us for more information on our groups, which are open to men from all backgrounds and walks of life.
