You finally made it, nailed that leadership role, and got your place in the senior team you ever wanted and desired. From now on, it will be easier, you think. And here is where your mistake. Whether you go – inside your organization or outside to another organization – getting into a leadership role demands more from you than you can ever imagine. While being the expert in your field has made you recognizable, your skills will now need to adopt are much different. The people you will now need to work with will look at you with different eyes. They will not praise you for what you have done before but will daily judge your decisions, behavior, and presence. You will now have to let go of what you have done and achieved before to step into your new role and achieve even more impressive results. The new reality demand that you act differently and avoid what you think was right back. This same reality pushes you to go one more extra mile to transform yourself and then change the environment so that you and the people you are now responsible for achieving more remarkable results.
Sounds scary? It better not be.
The new role and the leadership presence are now forming one new YOU, able to see the things happening from a different perspective and act toward them in a way that will be positive for both – you and the others.
As a new leader, you will need to focus on finding your balanced approach toward the environment while playing and winning with others.
To do all this, you need a new mindset and focus on several categories that can make or break your leadership role and presence in the team. First, get to know them better, and by working on them, you will successfully draw your own leadership path. Here are the five categories of skills and attitudes that can help you become the leader everyone dreams about.
Communication skills
Not surprisingly, the first category is more than expected. To be a good leader, you will need to learn to communicate with everyone. People are different; some are positive, and others play negatively. A group of people is a mixture of all variations of emotions and attitudes that you can see. So you have the positive person who is always full of energy but not keen on details; on the other side, you have the negative person who always sees struggling and obstacles, and there is also the person who procrastinates, sitting right next to the one who is always “logical and with no emotions.” And it would be best if you worked with all of them. Not because you are punished for doing that, but because having all of them on board will create balance. So your first task is to learn how to communicate with everyone in the team and understand the organizational dynamics to help yourself achieve goals by building alliances through sharing your position and aligning it with everyone else.
Attitude and goal-setting skills
You took over that leadership role you always desired. And now you need to plan how you will need to work on your attitude: no more angry faces, no more tuff to read expressions. Instead, the focus will be to show others a positive attitude and supportive behavior. Just saying that you support someone is not enough anymore. You will need to show it with your behavior, actions, and, most importantly, your outlook in different situations. With that, you will need to walk the people through the agenda you have in your mind or discuss it with them. There are plenty of tasks that need to be completed, and you are the one to drive them to the end. What you have seen as an operational task – now needs to turn into something bigger, making a more substantial impact. It would help if you learned to set goals that will involve everyone on the team to give their best to achieve them. No one’s work or expertise should be left behind. Everyone counts, and you will need to develop the skills to oversee the whole team’s capabilities and work and create goals that will make everyone participate.
Relationship skills
People rely on work and personal life on relationships. For a leader to be successful, they need to build a relationship in the environment. Thus some leaders use harsh approaches relationships often struggle. A good relationship builder can overcome obstacles while using the help of others. It is a crucial skill for every leader to build. Relationships are not easy to assemble. They need time and effort to be invested. But a good relationship built can benefit both sides. As many quality relationships the leader can create, they will be in and outside work more successful.
Decision making time management, and self-discipline skills
We often hear that leaders need to lead others by example. The example is too overrated these days. The leader doesn’t need to be an example everywhere and in everything. But there are crucial areas where all people somehow need to see a good example and follow it to be more productive and happy. We have many distractions in our lives, and everything that can help us become more organized and manage better priorities in our agenda is always welcome. The leader must not do her job but show by example how the person can be more productive by building better skills in both areas.
Another crucial element where the leader can be an example is the decision-making and execution process. People often fail to achieve something or deliver a result because they invest too much time thinking about starting or not the task and how the outcome will affect them and others. The good thing that a leader can do with this is to be an example of how a person can stand behind a decision taken and defend their point of view and understanding in a particular area. How a person stands behind a decision can affect performance and execution and internal motivation and engagement.
Stress Anxiety and emotion management skills
The last group of skills the leader must manage is connected with their emotional intelligence. The world we live in is fast-paced, where Stress and anxiety are every day. But there are both levels, and while there can be healthy Stress mobilizing us to achieve results, there can also be negative Stress and emotion, causing us to feel uncomfortable and emotionally unstable. No one is insured that they won’t get any pressure. For the leader, learning how to manage Stress and anxiety is crucial to building the image of a balanced person, staying in the middle of what is happening, and managing it with the best outcome. With that in mind, the leader must learn how to demonstrate good stress and anxiety management skills as an example to others.
But learning to manage Stress goes through emotions. People do not act as logical creatures, but as emotional bombs in many situations. Managing Stress and anxiety can be achieved only through managing emotions because emotions are what make us different. The logic comes to exclude emotions. It offers clear solutions but at the same time is flat and relies on one-dimensional thinking. Emotions, on the other side, are complex dimensional thinking and reactions. They make our days full of surprises. Emotions can be highly favorable in one moment or change to harmful. For the leader, managing emotions and showing others how to do it is a high form of learning and development for themselves and others around.
IN CONCLUSION:
Many skills to learn to become a great leader? Not surprising. A leader’s role has evolved from the logical and controlling function of the manager to bring to the world the understanding that anyone can be an inspiration to the masses. With the right attitude and flexible working toward challenges and change in life and work, the leader’s role is central to people’s development by taking the responsibility to teach people every day how to be more successful and happy in every area of their life and work.
The Human place 