Jan Richards

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leadership skills

Six ways to grow your leadership strength

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Like any skill or ability, leadership strength, one of the top ten characteristics of great leaders, can increase with learning, experimentation, practice, and experience.

As you develop this, or any leadership skill, you stretch the boundaries of your leadership comfort zone and proficiency.

If you’re ready to become a stronger leader, here are six ways to start:

1. Select a leader you admire and emulate his or her strengths

Keep this person in mind as a guide to emulate, learn about, and learn from as you experiment, build and refine your strength as a leader.

2. Get feedback on your leadership

Seek information about your strengths and areas for improvement from peers and direct reports, in addition to seeking and using your manager’s feedback.

The information, if honestly provided and viewed, may be eye-opening and humbling, in complimentary as well as instructive ways.

3. Know where you’re going

Create a vision to keep your attention, intention, and actions aligned with the long-term goals for your team.

In addition to creating a compelling vision, use simple but consistent and effective follow-up practices to keep you on track.

4. Listen and observe

You may or may not like what you hear and see when you check in to see how things are going, but you need to know what’s really going on.

Regular, honest assessment is essential to know how you and your team are really doing, and to be able to respond and adjust effectively to actual conditions, rather than what you hope to find.

5. Improve the ways you get your work done

Make your work life easier, and your results more predictable through effective process management.

Simplify and improve the processes, measures, feedback and follow-up practices you and your team use.

6. Build bench strength

This gives you greater capacity and adaptability, as a team.

It also extends your leadership reach and effectiveness. You can’t be everywhere, all the time, after all.

You’re more effective as a leader if you create processes, measurements, and good practices for your team to be able to self-monitor, self-manage and self-correct, as much as possible, in addition to seeking and using feedback you provide them.

A big part of your job as a leader is to create more, and better leaders, in your company.

As Tom Peters notes, “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.”

Four decision making mistakes to avoid

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Being able to make good decisions, at all levels of your organization, is vital to your company’s success.

It’s also vital to your professional and personal success, no matter who you are or what you do.

Decision making skill, one of the top ten characteristics of great leaders, is more difficult than many people realize.

Consider this thought:

“Some problems are so complex that you have to be…well-informed just to be undecided about them.”

Laurence J. Peter

Great decisions can have deep, lasting and positive effects on many people.

Think about the far-reaching impact of these three decisions:

  • Columbus’ decision to seek the New World
  • John F. Kennedy’s decision that the US would land a man on the moon, and do so before the decade was out
  • Rosa Parks’ decision not to give up her seat on the bus one day in Montgomery, Alabama

Poor decision quality is equally powerful, but in undesirable ways. It can have devastating effects on people, organizations, and even entire countries.

Here’s just one example (and there are many, including many current examples):

Think about the impact on US and world financial markets of a few false assumptions about market risk and how to best manage it in 2008 (and in the years leading up to it). In addition, what was deemed adequate oversight of financial institutions turned out not to be.

It all added up to very big, very bad, very sudden surprises for many people and institutions, with long-term repercussions.

What are some of the primary problems?

Here are just a few:

1. Being unable to decide without a lot of information.

And then, being unable to swim one’s way through the sea of data, information and opinions to reach a valid, effective and timely decision.

2. Being decisive – but too much so.

Decision-makers may reach conclusions quickly, based on too little information, or inaccurate, deceptive, or untimely information.

3. Simplifying information so much that it’s stripped of significance.

Data and information may be overly simplified – or it may be unwieldy.

Either way, it may be difficult to synthesize information, or to understand the deeper meaning the data could have provided. In addition, it may not be possible to draw meaningful conclusions with information stripped of significant detail.

4. Disowning one’s decisions.

This can occur if a leader fears the pushback that naturally happens at some point in almost every change or transition process, and then overreacts to it.

We’ve touched on significant ways that decisions can go wrong.

How can decision making go right?

First, great leaders ensure that they have the reliable, accurate, timely information that they need.

And they make sure that their process for making decisions is effective and continually improved, as needed.

These are characteristics of good decisions:

  • Timely
  • Well-informed
  • Take into account the needs and desires of the various people who will be most affected by the outcomes
  • Prioritize and use criteria that will yield a good result

Decision making comes easily to some people, but for others, it is a continuing challenge.

These skills can be learned and improved, with focus and practice. And they are absolutely, positively essential for leadership excellence. 

You place your bets when you set strategy

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Strategy. Strategic.

Do those words make you feel excited, eager, energized? Or does your heart start racing a bit in fear, at the mere mention of strategy, and the responsibility it brings?

Leaders’ reactions to strategic opportunities run the full gamut from fear and apprehension to eagerness to take on the challenge.

Some people like the excitement of sizing up the future and placing their bets on a particular course of action and events which strategy setting really represents.

For others, the word “strategy” and “strategic” make them break into a fearful sweat. For this group, the risks of getting it wrong seem far higher than the thrill of getting it right.

Strong strategic skills – strategic thinking, strategy setting, and strategic management – are among the top characteristics of great leaders.

The essence of strategic ability is that, of the many paths of action open to an organization, great leaders can see, and then take – or make – the strategic course most likely to lead to success.

They can find their way through uncertainty to high customer satisfaction, product, service and process excellence, and maximum profitability.

When you set strategy, you’re placing your bets – and committing your resources – to what you believe will happen in the future, and what your best response is likely to be to the anticipated future.

What’s really involved in being a great strategist?

You must be able to envision playing the game out completely, rather than to just hope things will work out, magically and effortlessly.

You must have alternative paths figured out in case the paths you envision are wrong, or eliminated for some reason.

You must have or be able to get the resources you need to turn the strategy into effective action.

You must have good information, and know how to use it for effective decision-making, having considered those decisions from many different points of view

You must have the confidence to choose the best course, and stay that course or adapt, as you see what’s happening, as conditions continue to change.

You must keep your eyes on the ultimate prize, the vision of success, given the circumstances at any point, and what may still lie ahead.

Taking the risk, and placing your bet on how you think the uncertain future will play out is not an easy task.

Strategic skills are essential as a leader, however. As with other leadership skills, you can build and refine strategic skills, too, through learning, focus and practice.

What do you do about a goal you forgot…or have been resisting?

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Are you finding, as you build momentum in this new year, that there is a goal you “forgot”?

It can happen.

It may be a goal that:

– You hoped you could, and others would, forget about.

– Was something you never wanted to do, but knew you needed to.

– Was buried, day by day, as more immediate issues got in the way.

If there’s a goal like this for you as we move farther into 2022:

1. Decide if this forgotten goal is something you still want to achieve.

Sometimes there’s a goal we hope to get to, but it’s big enough that we just don’t grasp quite how to begin to tackle it, much less know how to completely meet it.

At other times, the forgotten goal may be one you once had, but have now outgrown or, for other reasons, no longer hold.

2. If this is a goal you still want, get excited about it again.

Maybe there are great benefits to getting this work done which you haven’t focused on fully yet.

Take some time to imagine you’ve achieved the goal. Experience that feeling of victory in its full glory…all the sights, sounds, and elation.

Also imagine the process of getting there. See yourself rising above each challenge that may crop up along the path.

3. Accept it if this is something you have to achieve, whether you want to or not.

This may be a “should” or “must” that you still have to carry forward.

If so, accept it (easy to say, but hard to do…I know that from experience). And get moving.

There is a lot of power in acceptance. The energy you’ve spent running away can be used in far better ways. You may, and probably will, find that you’ve met your goal far more quickly than you expected, once you’ve buckled down and gotten the work done.

Suddenly, the goal will be met, and the burden will have been lifted, as well.

4. Increase your dissatisfaction with the status quo.

This is the opposite of getting excited about a goal you still want to achieve.

To get to the point of action, sometimes we have to wait until we’re really ready to let go of the past. And, well, sometimes that takes a lot of unhappiness with the status quo. We have to be far more ready to go than to stay in the situation we currently find ourselves in.

How can you increase your dissatisfaction with your current situation, making you less willing to tolerate the status quo?

5. Take your big goal and turn it into a series of smaller, more accessible and achievable goals.

Put those smaller goals on your calendar and work to achieve each of those, one by one.

You’ll create a steady stream of achievements, which has far more benefits than you might realize now.

Are you really change-ready?

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You may think you’re ready for change — until you get up to the starting line and the action is about to start.

And when you do – much like standing at the starting line of an important race – that’s no time to find out you’re unprepared, or that you really don’t want to make the change, at all.

Change isn’t easy, no matter what type of change you’re making (or being asked to make), and no matter who else is involved.

But change works out far better if you’re ready for it – and all the twists and turns it can bring.

It works better, too, if you seek change, rather than to be caught reluctantly by it.

Better still is change you yearn for.

And best of all is if you’re driven enough to accomplish the change you seek to make and are so driven that you can unquestionably move over, around, or through any barriers you find that could stand in the way of the success you’re trying to create with that change.

Change, of course, comes in many forms.

We all know from experience that not all change is change we welcome.

Here are just a few of the types of major change that you may face at some time, and ways that you can adapt to them:

1. Change can be thrust upon us by life circumstances.

A lot of the process of change requires acceptance (which is, by the way, far from a passive state and sometimes a state that not easily arrived at). Adaptability is also essential. And sometimes figuring out ways to “make do” for a while is required, too.

These are not experiences that dreams are made of. They are, however, sometimes the stuff that heroic stories are made of.

And like it or not, these experiences can be some of the ones that toughen us up most and make us strong, ready for even greater challenges of other types, later in life.

2. Great change may happen serendipitously.

For example, let’s say you have an interesting opportunity, and decide to take it. An interesting experience occurs, as a result.

You notice that you liked the experience, and decide to repeat the experience or experiment.

An interesting path starts to unfold.

Through these types of gradual change experiences, career interests or passions are sometimes discovered, new skills are developed, opportunities emerge, and rewarding relationships often emerge, too.

3. Change that you yearn for is the change that dreams are often made of.

If these changes are really big ones, they often take hard work and careful planning, skill development, and coordination with other people.

These changes are often driven by a very powerful and compelling vision you hold of the outcome you seek.

Whatever the change you face, to the degree you can be, it’s best if you’re ready for the race and challenge of change.

But that’s not possible in every case.

And no matter what happens, or why change occurs, you can’t anticipate and plan for all twists and turns, opportunities, challenges, and differences ahead that will emerge, no matter what type of change has arrived.

Change doesn’t have to buckle you to your knees, nor does it have to overwhelm you, even if it is the type you didn’t seek.

Change is a fact of life. Being change-ready and change-responsive — if it’s not yet one of your strengths — is a skill you’ll be glad to have when you have achieved it.