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Driving high-performance and excellence in the workplace starts at the top. According to Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, leaders contribute to 70% of their organization’s growth.
In a world where many organizations operate globally—with functions spread across countries—leaders not only have to manage teams internationally but also maintain customer relations.
For the senior executives in your organization, you must try to encourage effective leadership skills. You can give them a platform to reach their highest potential and achieve organizational goals.
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Must-Have Skills For Leadership
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Examples Of Leadership Skills
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How To Encourage Effective Leadership Skills
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Learners Of Today Are The Leaders Of Tomorrow
Must-Have Skills For Leadership
Anticipating and preparing for the future—with its many challenges—is better than going in unprepared. Important leadership skills help your organization’s senior executives to manage crises, mitigate risks and foster a healthy work environment.
Here are some of the essential skills for leadership that can drive excellence in your organization:
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Interpersonal Relationships
Managers and leaders must have the right skill set to build relationships with customers, teams and employees. Interpersonal skills are integral for sales and delivery teams because they have dealings with external stakeholders on a regular basis. Leadership that represents your organization holds a lot of weight in creating your brand’s image. Focusing on interpersonal skills will strengthen your market standing with long-term relationships with key groups. Customer engagement is critical to business growth as the feedback you receive helps you improve the quality of your services or products.
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Power To Influence
Leaders should have the power to positively influence their teams, clients or customers. If you want to get work done in your organization, your leadership has to be motivated enough to guide people. Influencing others helps you retain clients, expand your business and establish your credibility. This is true at the brand level as well–companies like OnePlus have a loyal customer base. This is because they have the power to positively influence their users. They deliver on their promises and offer user-friendly services that appeal to their customers.
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Commercial Acumen
A leader who can develop sound financial strategies for your business is an asset. The ability to read, interpret and understand financial statements is part of commercial acumen. Senior executives—across functions—should be well-versed with your organization’s financial vision. They also need to be resilient in the face of setbacks, willing to challenge norms and able to strategize to survive market competition. It’s important to know what works in the market and what doesn’t.
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Effective Decision-Making
Decision-making is one of the most critical skills for leadership given each decision has the power to alter your organization’s future. Effective leaders can think objectively, seek inputs from others and weigh different options before making a decision. High-performance behavior needs nudges in the right direction.
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Growth Mindset
Each member of your organization brings a unique worldview and perspective. Whether it’s their values, beliefs or even ideas, leadership will possess notions that differ from others. For you to create an environment that’s constantly evolving, your leaders must have a growth mindset. They should be willing to adapt to changes—internal or external—and help their teams transition smoothly.
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Empathy, Humility And Authenticity
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, humility is being humble and authenticity is being true to yourself. A leader should utilize each of these qualities to build rapport with teammates, practice positive and ethical leadership and develop interpersonal relationships. If leaders can listen to their employees with conviction, they can help them overcome personal and professional barriers. In the workplace, it’s critical to create an environment that benefits everyone equally.
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Critical Thinking Ability
In an era where socio-economic and technological factors change overnight, critical thinking ability enables people to embrace change with confidence. Leaders must have the cognizance to take a step back, analyze a problem and come up with creative solutions. For instance, say you want to implement a response management system in your organization. Reducing the turnaround time on a project will increase efficiency. Leaders can develop strategies to roll out easy, effective and user-friendly ways to do this.
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Simplify Complex Problems
Whenever organizations face challenges and problems, their go-to solution must be to break down problems. Instead of diving in headfirst, leaders must have the capacity to think about how they can break down a problem into smaller, manageable chunks. This helps streamline the problem-solving process, keep track of progress and discover faults as you go. Understanding problems is an effective strategy to stay on top of things, monitoring each and every decision that’s being made in your organization.
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Drive Innovation
Innovation and advancement help you sustain competition, especially in a volatile market. When leaders helm innovation, you have a stronger chance at establishing your credibility in your industry. New ideas must be developed internally, with inputs from your teams and across levels—collaboration is what’ll get you from now to your goals. You can find ways to assist your senior executives to take initiative and drive innovation in the workplace.
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Strong Communication Skills
Communication skills are important skills for leadership because they determine just how well your organization is received. Organizations need to communicate with customers, clients, executives, employees and other stakeholders. Effective writing, speaking and listening skills have the power to impact your brand message. You’ll find it easier to mitigate risks when messages are conveyed clearly and accurately.
Effective leadership skills are critical in the workplace because of their impact on the overall functioning of the organization. Leaders guide teams to success—or failure, making it even more important to focus your efforts on building leadership skills internally. Delegation, giving and receiving feedback and understanding others are a few of the other skills of a good manager.
Examples Of Leadership Skills
Understand how you can drive a high-performance organizational culture in your organization with examples of leadership skills.
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Raj was leading the sales team at his organization. One of his employees was having trouble working with their teammates. Raj noticed there was animosity between them, affecting the quality of their work. He decided to call a meeting, discuss what’s wrong and plan next steps. With his face-to-face conflict resolution technique, Raj was able to settle the matter without offending anyone.
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As the delivery head, Shefali was constantly bombarded with customer complaints regarding late deliveries. She sat down with her team, asked them where they thought the problem was and developed an effective “last mile” delivery—the final step in the delivery process—solution. Collaboration, communication and objective thinking helped Shefali come up with viable solutions to a critical problem.
Good leadership skills can be developed over time with experience, willingness to learn and self-awareness. But how an organization encourages their leadership to practice these skills is equally—if not more—critical. Giving them a platform where they can refine their skills based on past knowledge will further your cause and motivate them to perform.
How To Encourage Effective Leadership Skills
You must build a team of high-performing leaders who are ready to embrace the challenges of tomorrow. With learning and development initiatives, you can boost your leadership’s confidence, equip them with tools to navigate setbacks and enable them to embrace challenges.
Here are ways to promote effective leadership in your organization:
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Establish a two-way feedback channel so leaders are aware of their strengths and weaknesses as much as their employees
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Strengthen learning and developing efforts to give leaders a chance to refine existing skills, raise their concerns and improve their efficiency
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Schedule meetings to discuss best practices, strategies and solutions before implementation to prevent the risks of miscommunication
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Build diverse teams to help your employees adapt to different work styles, approaches and perspectives
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Customize your efforts toward leadership development to account for differences in learning goals
Organizations are responsible for creating a learning environment, where employees are given a chance to correct their mistakes, improve their faults and realize their full potential.
Learners Of Today Are The Leaders Of Tomorrow
Navigating the demands of an evolving landscape is simpler when those who front operations are well-equipped. Enable your leadership to arm themselves with the right frameworks, principles and approaches to move with the times. Running global organizations, heading operations and leading teams take a certain skill set. Harappa’s learner-first High Performing Leaders program is designed for leaders who are inspired by the future. Map their learning journey and encourage them to achieve transformative results.
The program highlights 15 must-have thrive skills to drive high-performance behaviors in the workplace. Today, you need management that strives for excellence. The course includes powerful application-oriented frameworks like Design Thinking, Decision Trees and Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Model Instrument to nudge cognitive, social and creative thinking skills.
Leadership development influences key organizational functions, making it critical for the modern workplace. Instead of expecting immediate results, implement a continuous learning process in your organization for optimal results.
Explore Harappa Diaries to learn more about topics such as Adult Learning Principles, The Evolution Of The Hero’s Journey & The Importance Of Women’s Leadership which will help organizations tap into their employee's potential.
