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How developed are your leadership skills?

team development

So far, we've gone over three of the five areas you need to understand to be a great leader who grows a healthy team: Driving Forces, Behaviors, and Emotional Intelligence. Next, we're going to cover Competencies or soft skills. 

All people have all of these personal skills to one degree or another. Everyone can't be good at everything, however, so you want to focus on developing the competencies that

  • A) You are already strong in 
  • B) Focus on the ones that you need to be strong in for your current and future roles.

Over the next few lessons, we will be investigating each of these 25 abilities one at a time to help you grow as a leader.

How do I develop as a leader?

Developing your skills as a leader is just like developing any other skill, it takes practice and lots of it. The trouble is, it's not always as easy to identify how developed our skills are at work, especially in "white-collar," creative or knowledge work. In fields with lots of technical skill required, like dental hygiene, auto repair, public speaking, drywall installation, brain surgery, basketball, plumbing, etc. it can be easier to identify when a technical, or "hard skill" is not up to par.

For so many of us whose primary role is to lead others, however, even knowing what we need to get better at is not always clear.

In each of the coming weeks, we'll be focusing on one of the 25 competencies to help you understand what the soft skills are that everyone can develop, or allow to remain undeveloped.

25 Personal Skills (in alphabetical order)

  1. Appreciating Others
  2. Conceptual Thinking
  3. Conflict Management
  4. Continuous Learning
  5. Creativity and Innovation
  6. Customer Focus
  7. Decision Making
  8. Diplomacy
  9. Employee Development/Coaching
  10. Flexibility
  11. Futuristic Thinking
  12. Goal Orientation
  13. Influencing Others
  14. Interpersonal Skills
  15. Leadership
  16. Negotiation
  17. Personal Accountability
  18. Planning and Organizing
  19. Problem Solving
  20. Project Management
  21. Resiliency
  22. Self Starting
  23. Teamwork
  24. Time and Priority Management
  25. Understanding Others

Download a nice PDF of this list with definitions for each skill.

How have you developed each one of the skills above? Are you able to employ them to add value to your team? Let's find out in the coming weeks.

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