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, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, third-party maintenance providers, 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.

Feedback is not enough. What else employees need from leaders to be their best

 

The six most dreaded words for any employee: "Can I give you some feedback?"

The Gallup organization has found that only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive helps them do better work.

Clearly, feedback isn't working the way it should.

Today, as leaders know, the workplace is radically different. Modern organizations are more decentralized, matrixed and agile. Employees have greater autonomy and are required to be creative in how work gets done.

This means leaders can't just give employees feedback about what they did "right" or "wrong." They must listen, ask questions, gain context and create a two-way dialogue in order to heighten self-awareness leading to better choices and outcomes.

The practice of management is far too complex for a simple rubric to transform how employees perform and develop. And there has never been a one-page checklist that can turn a bad manager into a good one.

Effective leadership requires managers to help employees prioritize multiple projects, shift deadlines, remove barriers and manage interpersonal challenges. There's hardly ever a single "perfect answer" to modern business problems.

In many professional situations, a successful outcome is based on emotional factors:

• how a customer feels after interacting with you
• how a team feels about a new initiative
• how a vendor feels about partnering with you

"Feedback" rarely makes sense in these situations. What you really want is an open, honest, two-way dialogue that strengthens relationships rather than one-way instruction and criticism.

To put it simply, traditional feedback is one direction (leader to follower), episodic (i.e., infrequent and isolated) and focused on past mistakes that can't be fixed.

Coaching conversations, on the other hand, are about now and what's next. Coaching conversations put the employee's potential at the center, in an ongoing, middle-of-the-action dialogue.

Great Managers Lead Great Conversations
Imagine the best manager you've ever had. More than likely, they were great at having meaningful conversations -- where you felt like you were heard and understood.

They may have delivered difficult messages or pushed you harder than you were used to, but somehow it didn't feel bad. They didn't always follow a script or a rubric. They adapted their approach to what you needed in the moment (Thank you Ken Blanchard for the blessing that is Situational Leadership!).

That's the power of individualized conversations. An employee feels known, understood, heard and appreciated -- even when the topic of discussion isn't pleasant. Great leaders build performance conversations around an employee's unique strengths while addressing weaknesses, so that the dialogue is naturally positive and constructive.

Leaders need to understand that these skills don't come naturally to most managers. They need to be taught, ideally in a role-play or real-life environment, and developed over time.

Feedback Focuses on the Past; Coaching Conversations Focus on the Future

 
Business today moves fast. Employees need to be adaptable in an environment where every aspect of a business can be ripe for disruption.

Like a good coach, great managers are always thinking about the next play, the next game and the next win.

They keep conversations focused on the future. What can we do to improve our chances of success next time? What would it look like to exceed our expectations? How can we prepare for the future?

Great managers are achievement-oriented and focused on developing their teams.

 
That's not to say managers should stop giving feedback all together. There's no doubt that reflecting on past performance and discussing how it went is important -- it facilitates learning.

The problem is employees typically experience feedback as criticism that is delivered far too long after the fact. Feedback is helpful when it's immediate and constructive. And even then, feedback alone does not translate to great coaching.

Improving feedback -- how you tell people about your observations and opinions -- is a low bar. It captures a small sliver of the picture.

Often, managers don't adequately observe performance or have enough expertise to tell employees how work should actually be done. Great managers take their coaching to the next level by observing, listening and proactively anticipating topics that will be useful to employees in the future.

They paint a vision for the future -- a portrait of success -- and establish ongoing dialogue with employees that helps them comfortably discuss issues they encounter along the way.

Great Coaching Conversations Are a Busy, Two-Way Street

 
Employees often feel like feedback "happens" to them. While well-intended, it's an event that tends to feel critical and condemning. And worse, research shows that it only improves performance about one-third of the time, while actually making it worse one-third of the time.

Great coaching conversations are a two-way street. Employees should feel encouraged to share their perspective, ask questions and bring issues to their manager. And it should be a busy two-way street. Frequent, meaningful conversations are key to fostering collaboration and engaged performance.

Great coaches inspire you to achieve more than you thought you could. They do exponentially more than just tell you what to do. They teach you to own your performance, do what's best for the organization and be a great partner.

By opening the door to great conversations, difficult conversations become easier, too. Important issues are no longer a surprise -- you can see them coming and hopefully do something about them before they become a problem.

Imagine trying to have a really tough conversation before that busy, two-way street has been established. Addressing sensitive topics like diversity and inclusion, pay, promotion, or under-performance are all going to feel scary if you haven't already built up some understanding and trust with your teammate.

Learn From the Best Manager You've Ever Had (or Wish You Had)

 
Great managers inspire independence and ownership in pursuit of high performance. That only comes through frequent, open-ended conversations where people feel like their honest opinions will be valued and respected.

Managers today may not be the experts in every situation, but they can shape conversations and deliver support in a way that leads to continual improvement.

Leaders can take the initiative here. They can change the expectations for how collaboration happens and how work gets done in their organizations. They can set up learning and development programs that teach these coaching skills to their managers.

And leaders can model these behaviors themselves:

• Learn more about your employees.
• Ask questions.
• Listen.
• Encourage them to bring their best ideas.
• Help them play to their strengths while addressing their weaknesses
• Do this consistently and you'll become the great partner they want to talk to.
  

Check out a related post: Is Your Feedback Invisible to Your Direct Reports?

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, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, third-party maintenance providers, 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.

Curiosity: An Essential Attitude of Leaders During Rapid Change

 

 

If you’re a leader, a business owner, an investor, a manager, a salesperson, or a problem-solver, one of the greatest assets you can have for thriving during rapid change is your thirst for answers—your curiosity.

The Curious Thing About Curiosity

All of us have untold potential. Yet it’s easy to fall into behaviors that prevent us from reaching what we are capable of. These behaviors are almost always the result of self-limiting beliefs. There are millions of them:

I can’t lose control because the world will spin apart.
I can’t love because I’ll be hurt.
I can’t speak up because I’ll be put down.
I can’t challenge the status quo because I’ll be punished.
I can’t try because I’ll fail.

Although none of these things may be true, many people act as though they are. And limit themselves as a result.

Each of these beliefs is personal. It’s easy to see how they might affect a person's behavior, happiness, or chances for success. But underlying them all is another limiting belief—one that is more insidious and in many ways harder to deal with than any of the others. It is the belief that the way things ‘are’ is permanent.

“It is what it is” may be true.
“It will always be what it is” couldn’t be further from the truth.

Nothing is permanent. Your body and your mind change from moment to moment. Eventually, those changes (we call them aging) become so profound that you wear out: you cease to exist.

Even though we see the impermanence of life almost daily, we often cling to the belief that certain other things are permanent. Knowledge, for example, is permanent, isn't it?

Not at all. The history of science is the story of human beings converting what we know into what we thought we knew. The Greek astronomer Ptolemy thought the earth was the center of the universe with the sun and stars revolving around it. Today we know that our earth is a small planet on the outer edge of a remote galaxy billions of lightyears from the center of the universe.

And some time in the future even this sophisticated concept of the way things are will prove to be faulty. It will become as obsolete as Ptolemy’s.

Many people find the idea of impermanence unsettling. But there’s another way to look at it. Impermanence can actually be empowering.

If we can accept that everything is changing, and that even what we ‘know’ is not stable, we can actually exercise enormous influence over our lives. Far from making us helpless, this belief actually gives us leverage.

If Nothing Is Permanent, Curiosity Becomes A Source Of Power

Think of it this way: If what you ‘know’ to be true has become no longer true, and you act as though it still is true, you are probably limiting your options.

Here’s a story that illustrates this point: In traditional South Asian societies, elephants were trained as beasts of burden. If you owned an elephant, you were wealthy. But you had to invest in your asset. Not only did you have to feed and care for it, you also had to make sure it didn’t wander off, get into your neighbor’s garden, or accidentally knock over the outhouse.

How do you keep an elephant in place? If you don’t have easy access to metals and forges with which to make chains, it’s not easy. Elephants are strong.

But Indian mahouts discovered a simple and reliable method. Soon after a calf was born, it was tethered by a heavy rope to a tree or stake pounded into the ground. The rope was tied around the animal’s leg with a slip knot. If the calf pulled, the rope tightened painfully. Over time, even the slightest pressure from the rope would warn the baby elephant to back off.

Adult elephants are kept in place with a much lighter rope. They can easily break it. But they don’t. Because they assume things haven’t changed and the rope will still cause them pain. As smart as they are, the elephants aren’t curious enough to question whether what they once knew to be true still is.

Most of us have elephant’s tethers of our own. We repeat the same behaviors over and over, simply because “that’s the way things are”.

One simple way out of this mess is to be curious. Pull at the rope. See what happens. You never know, you might find there’s a whole world out there waiting for you to explore.

Curiosity To The Rescue

Curiosity—combined with courage—is the root of every major advance human beings have ever made. So how can leaders, managers, salespeople, and problem-solvers use curiosity to their advantage?

By harnessing the power of questions. From simple, informational questions to complex, probing ones, questions are the key. There’s nothing new in this. Socrates discovered the power of questions 2,500 years ago, and the world’s most successful leaders, thinkers, humanitarians, inventors, investors, and artists have been using it ever since.

The most basic questions are informational: who, what, where, when, how long, how much, and so on. When you meet a new person, you can use these basic questions to open up areas for mutual discovery. You can find commonalities and connections, you can give yourself the chance learn another person's perspectives.

The next level is the complex, often difficult question that relentlessly probes for causes, reasons, and speculations. This is where you begin to discover what’s working for other people—and what isn’t. What they hope for and what they fear. These questions open worlds of problems and opportunities and challenges and solutions.

Finally, there are the questions that have no answer. These are the ones that create the new—that move us both individually and as a species to the next level.

Questions—the basic tool of curiosity—activate a very different part of the brain than mere statements. Questions literally energize the brain.

A Simple Experiment

See for yourself. Here’s a quick thought experiment. Look at the following sentence and notice what happens in your mind when you read it:

New technologies will change the way we live.

Now look at the next sentence. Notice what goes on in your mind as you read it:

How might new technologies change the way we live?

If you’re like most people, you didn’t react much to the first sentence—the statement. It probably just sat there.

But the second sentence—the question—activated your mind. You may have imagined possible futures, or thought about how technology has already changed the way you live or do business. In other words, something happened when your curiosity was triggered. It’s almost as though you can’t help yourself. Once you encounter a question, your mind jumps to try to answer it.

Curiosity Generates Energy!

Curiosity is the way we build both knowledge about the world and connection with the people around us. It’s also how we discover the new.

Mutual curiosity is a kind of two-way street that carries the traffic of human thought, feeling, commerce, connection, and possibility. 

Be humble, stay hungry.

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, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, third-party maintenance providers, 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.