Top 10 Effective Leadership Skills that Help Every Business Grow

Know which are the most crucial leadership skills today. Find out how you can apply those skills with additional tips as experts and senior leaders suggest.

Strategy and leadership are the core elements of every successful business anywhere. For a manager in any domain, good leadership skills are crucial for aligning the team members with their company’s unique business strategy. So which strong leadership skills are signs of an effective leader? Read on. 

Communication

Amazing communication skills are among the most important leadership qualities. Today’s leaders must be great at it, as they are responsible for empowering team members to meet organizational goals.

Communication can help in areas where employees must consider time management and successfully completing tasks. Team members must be clear with their goals and constantly motivated to reach them. 

Without it, there can be a lot of friction due to misinterpretation among team members, causing unproductivity. 

You can also learn how to develop effective communication skills. Check out the tips to get started. 

Pro Tips for Communication 

• Maintaining transparency among all team members
• Asking questions that are open-ended instead of pinpointing mistakes
• Maintaining proper body language
• Being open to feedback
• Active listening

You can also take up some communication courses to update your approach, as and when required. 

Explore more related courses

Self-Awareness

Your leadership abilities are defined by your awareness of how you present yourself. Your personality and how you react to difficult situations are indicators of your self-awareness. 

It is essential to highlight that you cannot always be right, and you can be accountable for your decisions. At the same time, you should also be able to show your strengths. Showing these traits helps the team trust you more. 

Without self-awareness, you can come off as someone arrogant. That, in turn, may create distrust among your team members and lead to a hostile work environment. 

Pro Tips for Self-Awareness

• Knowing what triggers you emotionally
• Practising self-discipline
• Knowing your strengths and weaknesses
• Identifying how others in your team perceive you
• Practising constant self-evaluation

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is a broad leadership skill encompassing empathy, self-awareness, social awareness, self- and relationship-management. 

Having this skill means you can identify the surrounding dynamics. It also shows how good of a mentor you can be. 

You must know how to control your emotions and others as a leader. Promoting a healthy emotional well-being at the workplace, staying focused, etc., creates a positive work environment. 

Pro Tips for Emotional Intelligence

• Not reacting to situations immediately and giving way to critical thinking
• Providing constructive feedback 
• Maintaining practical optimism
• Responding to the feelings of team members and not just their words

Develop your Emotional Intelligence on Alison, Emotional Intelligence: Cultivating Immensely Human Interactions on Coursera, etc., are some courses to get started on emotional intelligence. 

Apart from that, you can find various emotional intelligence self-tests online. Check out sources such as Psychology Today, TalentSmartEQ, etc. These self-tests cover different areas of emotional intelligence, from motivation to empathy.

Finance and Business Acumen

Among all the soft skills, a good leader is always aware of the financial state of the organisation. They have a good understanding of where it is headed in the near future. 

To make the right decision, leaders must consider the key metrics in finance, forecasting, and how the business strategy is implemented. Here, knowledge of finance and accounting fundamentals can be beneficial. 

Pro Tips on Finance and Business Acumen

• Giving importance to data literacy
• Evaluating alternate investment scenarios
• Creating an efficient business strategy through analysis

Check out some free business strategy courses. You can also go for advanced business strategy courses and acquire some certificates to improve your CV.

Planning 

Planning plays one of the most important roles in leadership, even though it is a necessity for managers. With a plan, goals can be met desirably. 

A good plan aligns with the business strategy and helps lay down the path for effective decision-making. The reason why planning is so much more vital today than five decades ago is because of the uncertainties in the future. 

As a leader, it is essential to be able to improvise on the plan if there is any challenge in the future. Today’s leaders are expected to implement plans to achieve short- and long-term objectives. 

Pro Tips on Planning

• Setting realistic goals that are data-driven
• Identifying the resources that the organisation currently lacks
• Ensuring flexibility in the plan for accommodating unforeseen changes or trends in the future

Delegation

Delegating tasks is a much broader aspect when it comes to a leader. It is more of a relationship behaviour where leaders empower the team to own their tasks. An effective leader is helpful in delegation when they can communicate the bigger picture. This can help when it comes to motivating employees to provide high quality work. 

Pro Tips on Delegation

• Constantly monitoring activities and performance 
• Being always accessible to team members
• Providing continual feedback through the progress of tasks
• Helping team members meet the goals

Continual Learning 

Updating knowledge on effective workflows and organising principles can be of much use in mentoring. Learning constantly can also create a positive and inspiring work environment where team members get motivated to upskill themselves. 

Pro Tips on Continual Learning 

• Helping every team member with their professional development
• Mentoring and coaching team members with newly updated knowledge
• Taking responsibility for helping team members learn 

Learning today is much easy and accessible. Just go through the list of free online courses with certificates available in all the major professional domains nowadays. 

Change Management

Change management is a key skill in the senior leadership role. For organizations today that have to go through unexpected changes, leaders can help make the transition smoother. 

If change management is not taken care of, the organisation will likely face two consequences. One is the inability to meet customer expectations. Second is the sinking motivation in the team. 

Just look at how Nokia and Kodak are almost out of popularity due to marketing myopia. 

It is upon businesses in the modern-day that they must be able to reinvent themselves by adapting to trends, no matter how successful they were a couple of years ago. That’s where strong leadership roles in change management is required. 

Pro Tips on Change Management

• Showing commitment to the change as an individual and as part of the organisation
• Managing resistance by engaging team members, and using a structured approach from the first phase of the change to counter the anticipated resistance on different levels

Check courses on change management such as Leadership Skills and Change Management in Uncertain Times on FutureLearn, Change Management: Real World Strategies & Tools on Udemy, etc. 

Innovation

Innovation is the key reason why more consumers prefer one product or service over another. As a leadership skill, it is vital for leaders to open grounds for fresh new ideas and making sure they are implemented if they are worthy. 

It is also the organisational environment that needs to encourage freedom of creativity, which must also align with the business’s goals. Great leaders can make that possible. 

Pro Tips on Innovation

• Defining an innovation strategy with concise guidelines for team members
• Becoming a role model for the team members to become innovative and think out-of-the-box
• Showing trust for team contributions to the innovation strategy 
• Creating a reward system for the ones who participate in the innovation strategy

Problem-Solving

Perhaps the most underrated skill but highly important, leaders are expected to be your more-than-average problem solvers. At the senior leadership level, this important skill can help in improving efficiency in day-to-day processes. The goal here is to reduce the problems that can negatively affect productivity. 

Pro Tips on Problem-Solving

• Considering the problem as a scope for improvement in specific areas
• Removing silos and promoting collaboration
• Identifying the cause of the problem to determine a strategy with more than one solution
• Testing the solutions and improving them

Parting Thoughts

These are the most essential skills for leaders. All of them are interrelated and cannot help organisations grow without one another. Hopefully, you can develop all these leadership skills in no time by taking strategy and leadership courses. 

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