How to Develop Fundamental Leadership Skills?

To start with the term, leadership is all about cooperating and making the team cooperate with the values while you move towards the goal.

In order to identify a leader we’re quite judgmental on the fact that who is a good or a bad leader.

But to be accurate about it, let us first understand the leadership traits. In order to possess good leadership skills, these qualities ought to be found consistent among good leaders.

But speaking of it, the question arises why leadership skills are important? So let’s first explore the “Why”, then we will see if we need to learn the “How” also.

WHAT’S IN IT

Why Become a Leader?

Everyone today be it a startup founder, businessman or corporate employee wants to become a leader. And it’s not wrong to aspire for it but it’s best if before even doing the striving of developing the characteristics of a leader, it’s better to look at, why should someone become a leader and make sure that you are not at the wrong place:

Money

If your main goal is just making a lot of money, then you need not do the hustle of becoming a leader. Because no doubt leaders make a good amount of money. But they have little to no time to spend that in their personal life.

There is a lot of work in the leadership position and if you do not like the work, it can piss you off. Better go for other money-making methods like being an social media influencer, designer or something like that.

Power

Obviously leaders have a lot of power, and that is why they are leaders. But with power comes great responsibilities. Every tough decision of the organization has to be made by you.

And never will everyone approve of your decision, so you have to work against those. Any small thing that goes wrong in the organization, you will be responsible and blamed for it.

Respect

Yes being a leader will bring you a lot of respect. People around you will be courteous to you. You will be served better food, given better rooms to stay in if you are on some work trip.

But as I mentioned in the previous point, you will have little to no time to enjoy this perks. Most of the time is only work. Planning for something. Executing something. Fixing something and the list goes on.

Mission bigger than you

If you have seen a dream and want to make it a reality, but it is not possible to execute it all alone.

Then you pick the idea of starting an organization or joining one, and lead the other people there in a specific direction towards a certain goal.

People will only walk on the path willingly with full jeal, if they see that the vision is not just about your personal gain, it’s about everybody’s well being.

Everybody will benefit from it and you have a certain capability to make it happen.

This is the most fulfilling and correct way of choosing to be a leader. To make great things happen under your guidance and using your team’s skills.

Leadership traits

Leadership provides freedom and flexibility at the workplace.

It makes you understand what is necessary to be done, which ideas should be adopted, the delegation and time table of working and the decisions to be taken in certain situations.

Let’s look at the different aspects of leadership skills and traits in a more detailed manner:

Communication

Communication is the most important aspect of a workplace if you really expect a good outcome. The leader must make things so comfortable amongst the team so that they can communicate and give efficient results.

Appreciation

The efficiency of the product will automatically be good if the members get proper recognition and appreciation of their work. A true leader should always appreciate the efforts of the team.

Motivation

To encourage the team and motivate them at every moment, it is important that the leader must in himself be motivated and confident.

A motivated leader has the capacity to always bring out their team from negative situations and failures.

Empathy/ Emotional Intelligence

There is no way you can work among humans and make them work for a particular goal without being empathetic but forcing them to work like robots.

Emotional Intelligence plays an important role in order to build trust and respect. When the team member realizes that their emotional and mental stability is taken care of, they will surely work for the organization putting all their efforts.

Courage

Leaders should be courageous to point out the failures in ideas of the team or mistakes of the team member. There are times we are not courageous enough to put our opinions in front of the other person when we see they have put effort in their work. The leader must point out things being humble.

Learning Agility

Leader must not be egoistic to accept new ideas and to learn new things if they are at a stake where they don’t know what to do next. Also this should be practiced among the team as well.

Delegating

The delegation of larger tasks into smaller tasks among the team members is important and the leader must know the art of doing this. Mostly there are chances that one hesitates in delegating task pressure and end up doing all by their own but increasing the pressure.

Delegating includes properly knowing the pros and cons of each member so that the task could be assigned effectively.

This also gives you free time to look into the more core aspects of the organization with more depth.

Vision

Achieving the goal comes from the vision you possess at the very starting. Also the leader should always think of the box, they should be a creative thinker and know the art of making the ideas work practically.

Accept defeat gracefully

Accepting defeat gracefully is a key to master leadership quality. To play the blame game in order to remove attention from you and not accept your own faults might just lead you to lose again.

Being the leader you have the responsibility to accept your failures being in front of and don’t give up. You must help the team grow their self-esteem by keeping your cool.

Conclusion

I would like to end by just saying that, take time and reflect, what do you really want to do in life and only then proceed in a direction.

You don’t want to be in a position after say 5 years which is socially famous but you yourself are not happy being there.

Also, you can read our blog on Learn top 10 benefits of project management

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