First Class Skills: Enhancing One’s Own Leadership

Key abilities often distinguish effective leaders from the rest of the population. A wise team leader assesses his or her own skills and cultivates ones to better lead people. Several prominent skills aid executive leaders in team development and in achieving the mission of the organization. How do you think you measure up?

First, effective leaders accept the responsibility to lead. They don’t abdicate their responsibility. The point in accepting the call to servant leadership is not to establish egalitarianism [equal rights for all] or a dictatorship, but rather to encourage increased responsibility in team members. You consistently convey that everyone pulls the rope together, yet uniquely. As you serve, it allows you to experience the joy of viewing, stretching, and strengthening each team member’s capacity. Accepting the mantle of leading endows you with the pleasure of promoting others’ growth and watching them bloom.

Another key skill for leaders is the ability to thoughtfully accomplish a strong vision. A leader plans and oversees the strategy and goals necessary to fulfil the purpose of the organization. Furthermore, leaders must be more than just a visionary; they must be strategic thinkers. In describing leadership, Dr. John Kotter states in What Leaders Really Do that the responsibility of leaders is to “develop strategies to accomplish vision—to do the tough work of gathering information and analyzing results. Leaders are strategic thinkers who are willing to take risks.” This type of leader strives to perceive what is around the bend, that which others aren’t actively looking for. Doing so helps the organization to advance and avoid the natural tendency to stall over time.

Effective leaders also have good relational skills and value people, balancing task-orientation with people-orientation. Effective leaders balance their commitment to getting the job done with deepening relationships within the team. J. Oswald Sanders once stated that an individual’s ability to make and maintain endearing friendships will serve as a measure of his ability to lead. How would you rate your relationship-building skills in this past month? Could you do anything different to improve in this area?

Along with using good relational skills, effective leaders use the skills of conflict management as a means of strengthening their teams. Out of healthy reconciliations that we have experienced in the past, we’ve come to experience caring, forgiveness, and mercy. Through these encounters, we’ve learned how to demonstrate healthy communication and reconciliation with staff members of differing backgrounds. Make these opportunities count!

While supervision and management are of great importance, developing a team is the paramount task of executive leaders. Researchers Kouzes and Posner emphasize building a team to accomplish the work at hand: “A one-word test for differentiating between leaders and managers that came through loud and clear in our case studies was the use of we instead of I. In the more than 500 cases we studied, we did not encounter a single example of extraordinary achievement that was accomplished without the active effort of many people.”

Using a high degree of participation and freedom, the wise leader builds a leadership structure that is genuinely open to mutuality and partnership. These and other skills distinguish a successful leader from an average one and, subsequently, help to compound the power of teams to build a stronger organization.