🕕 Six Essential Skills that Leaders Must Master

  

 

 

 

 

These six leadership skills matter in every industry. Every culture. And, at every level. They are foundational leadership tools for all the other ones.

It's impossible to learn every leadership skill you might need in any situation. But if you master these foundational leadership competencies, you’ll be off to an impressive start for whatever challenges come your way. Employ the 1% Better Rule (AKA kaizen) when working to master these leadership touchstones.

#1 Show Up with Confidence and Humility

"You can't always control what you show up to, but you CAN control how YOU show up." --Bill Thompson

To be a good leader at any level requires the delicate balance of showing up with both confidence and humility in every situation.

Jim Collins, author of the classic business book "Good to Great," calls this “land in the AND.“

Confident, successful leaders have a powerful vision of what’s possible. They own their strengths and leverage them well. They’re also able to stand up for what matters and speak the truth.

Leaders with humility have an accurate self-image. They’re willing to be vulnerable. They invite people to challenge them. And, admit their mistakes.

Why it matters:
When you can show up with both confidence and humility, you build deeper trust and connection. Your team sees you as an influential leader worth following. People want to follow a confident leader who helps them stretch to accomplish more than they ever thought possible. But, they also want to work for a human being who has the humility to know they don’t have all the answers and are open to suggestions and learning more.

#2 Focus on Results and Relationships

"Manage things. Lead people." --Stephen Covey

Most of us have a natural bent toward results or relationships (See the DiSC Workstyle assessment). But, great leaders know how to “land in the and” in this arena too.

Results-focused leaders set clear expectations. Have a solid plan to accomplish those expectations and hold people accountable for achieving them.

Relationship-focused leaders connect at a deep human level. Invest in developing their people, build on their strengths and recognize contributions, and foster collaboration up, down, and sideways. 

Why it matters:
Focusing on results alone may improve outcomes for a time while, but also burn out employees, increase apathy, and kill morale. I've seen too many managers end up isolated, frustrated, and working harder just to keep results from getting worse because they’re caught in this vicious circle. With just a little more focus on relationships, though, you can inspire people to commit more deeply to their goals.

You might also know managers who focus exclusively on relationships, showing up with a positive attitude, creating caring and supportive environments but with little to no accountability for results. The A-players inevitably flee because the best talent want to work on a winning team, and if you don’t care enough to build one, they’ll find one somewhere else.

#3 Mind the M.I.T. (Most Important Thing)

"Things that matter most should never be at the mercy of things that matter least." --Wolfgang Goethe

I've never met a manager who said, “you know, I just have too much time on my hands.” I call this dilemma, “infinite need, finite me.” The answer to the dilemma is to “Mind the MIT.”

Time management is a real challenge, even for the most successful leaders.

Great leaders who “Mind the MIT” focus their team on what matters most and paint a successful picture of what success looks like. And, equally importantly, translate this vision into tactical behaviors.

Why it matters:
When you can align your entire team around the most important strategic priorities with a shared vision of success, you lay the foundation for breakthrough results. And, by focusing on what’s most important you reduce that stressful feeling of overwhelm.

Check out a related post: The Problem With An Always Urgent Work Culture (9 min read)

#4 Communicate Consistently (5 x 5 Communication)

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”  

― George Bernard Shaw

When it comes to communication, great leaders work like the drummer of a band. You would never see a drummer kick off the cadence, set down the sticks, then sit back and watch the team play. They’re constantly keeping the beat for the team.

Good communication means consistently communicating what matters most and why. A cornerstone of sending effective messages is 5 x 5 communication. Anything that is truly important should be communicated five times, five different ways.

Why it matters:
People have a lot going on, and it’s easy to get distracted. When you prioritize communication about what matters most, you cut through the noise and help your team accomplish their MIT.

#5 Check for Understanding

"Message sent doesn't always equal message received. (But we usually assume it does.)"

-- P. McLees

Of course, setting clear expectations about what matters most and communicating what’s important five times, five different ways is not enough. You need to check to ensure your team gets it.

A  check for understanding is a simple check to see if your team is picking up what you’re putting down.

You want to check for understanding in two areas: actions and emotions.

Check for Understanding #1: Actions

The action-focused check for understanding ensures a mutually shared understanding of the activity. It looks like this:

 “Let’s do a quick check for understanding—what’s the first thing we’re going to do as we leave this meeting?”

The idea is to have your team tell you what they think they’ve heard so everyone is confident that they understand what happens next.

Check for Understanding #2: Emotions

The emotion-focused check for understanding gives your team a chance to process what’s happening and surface any issues that might arise. It looks like this:

 Leader: “Great meeting. I’m super excited about this strategy. Before we end, I’d like to ask, ‘How are you feeling?’”

Team member 1: “Well, I’m excited about it too, but I’m also worried about how we will do this considering our other priorities.”

Team member 2: “I’m feeling overwhelmed. These are wonderful ideas and I really want to do them, but I don’t know where to begin.”

Why it matters:

If people have concerns like this, it’s better to know before they leave the meeting so you can help your team move through them, adjust expectations, or remove roadblocks.

#6 Schedule the Finish

"It's not what you start in life, it's what you finish." --Katherine Hepburn

Life is crazy and your team has more to do than time to do it. Their interruptions will get interrupted. If you don’t have an intentional, focused way to finish what you start, it won’t happen.

Successful leaders don’t leave the finish to chance or a heroic act of willpower.

That’s where “scheduling the finish” comes in. Scheduling the finish means you and your team don’t leave the completion of critical items to chance, good intentions, or willpower.

Why it matters:
Good intentions and talented people aren’t enough to make sure the most important priorities happen. Especially when your people have a thousand things hitting their windshield plus the challenges of home and social concerns.

These essential leadership competencies work across any leadership situation you may encounter. For example, if you have a difficult conversation with an employee coming up? Ask yourself: How do I show up with both confidence and humility? 

Confidence: Own your strengths that you can handle this conversation with poise. Stand up for what matters and speaking the truth. AND Humility: Invite dialogue. Ask questions to understand their point of view. And really listen.

How can I reinforce the MIT? Communicate clearly (and follow-up in a different way) and Check for Understanding to ensure we’re all on the same page.

 

And of course, Schedule the Finish with a time to revisit the conversation again.

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement ? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

😤 Why Colleagues Don't Reply to Messages and What Can Be Done About It

 

 

 

 

 

 

A field guide to the modern workplace mystery of the disappearing response.

Somewhere, in a digital inbox not far from here, a perfectly reasonable request is sitting alone, wearing a tiny sweater, waiting to be loved.

You sent it on Tuesday. You followed up on Friday. By the next Wednesday, you began wondering if your co-worker had been promoted, abducted by aliens, or simply achieved inbox enlightenment and transcended email entirely.

Unresponsive communication has become one of the great workplace frustrations of our time. It happens with direct reports, teammates, virtual colleagues, and people in other departments who possess the one piece of information you need to finish your job, don't respond. The good news? Most people are not ignoring you because they are villains in cardigans. They are usually overwhelmed, unclear, under-prioritized, or trapped inside a communication system that rewards speed, noise, and heroic guessing.

Why Unresponsiveness Is Everywhere

 

1. We have too many channels and not enough rules

Email, chat, texts, project boards, meeting notes, shared docs, hallway conversations, and “quick pings” now compete for attention. When every channel is treated as urgent, every message becomes a tiny fire alarm. Eventually people stop hearing the bells.

2. Hybrid and virtual work removed the accidental glue

In the office, you could catch someone by the coffee machine, read their face in a meeting, or ask, “Did you see my note?” without sounding like a detective in a procedural drama. In virtual settings, those informal nudges disappear. People miss context. Teams become more siloed. Messages lose tone. A simple request can vanish into the fog like a ship named “Per My Last Email.”

3. Requests are often fuzzy

“Can you weigh in?” sounds polite, but it can also mean “Please review this 42-page deck, make a decision, bless the strategy, and maybe invent a budget.” When requests do not clearly state the action, owner, deadline, and decision needed, the recipient has to decode the message before responding. Many people delay not because they do not care, but because they are not sure what “done” looks like.

4. Accountability is blurry

If five people are copied, everyone may assume one of the other four will answer. This is the workplace version of watching a dropped napkin blow across the parking lot while everyone silently agrees it belongs to society now.

5. People are protecting focus, sometimes badly

Deep work and responsiveness are often in tension. Many people are trying to concentrate, manage meetings, meet deadlines, and avoid living permanently inside notifications. That is healthy. The problem comes when “I’m protecting my focus” quietly turns into “I have become unreachable, like a lighthouse with the bulb removed.”

What Individuals Can Do

·         Make your ask impossible to misunderstand. Start with the action you need: “Please approve,” “Please send,” “Please decide,” or “Please confirm.” Add the deadline and why it matters.

·         Use the subject line like a headline, not a junk drawer. “Decision needed by Thursday: vendor contract” beats “Question.” Always.

·         Respond before you can fully answer. A quick “I saw this and can get back to you Friday” prevents the sender from building a corkboard of theories.

·         Close the loop. If someone gives you information, acknowledge it. A simple “Got it, thank you” is the workplace equivalent of returning the shopping cart.

·         Escalate kindly, not dramatically. Try: “I know you’re juggling a lot. I need this by 3 p.m. to finish the client update. If you’re not the right person, who should I ask?”

What Teams Can Do

·         Create response-time norms. Decide together what “urgent,” “same day,” and “this week” actually mean. Spoiler: if everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.

·         Name the owner. Replace “Can someone handle this?” with “Maria, can you send the numbers by noon?” Clarity is accountability’s best friend.

·         Pick the right channel for the job. Use chat for quick coordination, email for formal requests, project tools for task tracking, and meetings for decisions that truly need conversation.

·         Document decisions where everyone can find them. If the answer lives only in a chat thread from three weeks ago, it does not live. It haunts.

·         Build in “response rituals.” A daily triage window, weekly blocker review, or end-of-meeting action recap can prevent small delays from becoming productivity potholes.

What Companies Can Do

·         Stop treating communication as a personality trait. Responsiveness is a system, a skill, and a leadership expectation not just something “organized people” magically do.

·         Train people on communication habits, not just software tools. Employees may know how to use the platform and still not know how to make a clear request, set expectations, or close a loop.

·         Model healthy responsiveness from the top. Leaders set the weather. If executives send midnight messages marked urgent, the culture will pack an umbrella and never sleep.

·         Reduce tool sprawl. Fewer channels with clearer purposes beat twelve platforms, three dashboards, and one mysterious spreadsheet named “Final_Final_UseThisOne_v7.”

·         Make cross-functional dependencies visible. When departments depend on one another, shared dashboards, service-level expectations, and clear escalation paths keep work moving without making everyone feel like they are begging for clues.

A Simple Communication Reset

Here is a practical starting point for any team: spend 30 minutes answering four questions together.

1.      What kinds of messages deserve a response within two hours, one business day, or one week?

2.      Which channel should we use for decisions, updates, questions, and emergencies?

3.     How will we make ownership and deadlines clear?

4.     What should someone do when they are blocked and the answer is not coming?

Write the answers down. Revisit them monthly. Adjust what is not working. The goal is not to create a communication constitution with tiny footnotes and a ceremonial gavel. The goal is to make work easier, kinder, faster, and less dependent on mind reading.

Unresponsive communication is not just an annoyance. It slows decisions, strains relationships, frustrates customers, and teaches people to follow up five times when one clear exchange should have been enough.

But it is fixable. Individuals can send clearer requests and close loops. Teams can create shared norms and visible ownership. Companies can design communication systems that support focus and accountability instead of hoping everyone develops psychic powers.

Because at the end of the day, responsiveness is not about being glued to your inbox. It is about respect, reliability, and helping other people keep their promises. Also, it dramatically reduces the number of messages that begin with “Just circling back,” which may be reason enough to start today.

May your messages be clear, your replies be timely, and your follow-ups be delightfully unnecessary.

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services,  real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.