- Introduction
- Study leadership
- Assess yourself
- Find a purpose that resonates with you
- Seek guidance and support from other leaders
- Take up responsibility
- Hone your communication skills
- Implement and practice
Introduction
Good leadership is the key to company success and innovation, and good leadership, like any other skill, can be learnt. Able leadership helps maximize the talents and efforts of others and translate plans and visions into concrete realities. The ability and willingness to lead and influence is a talent and skill that can be harnessed to its full potential if one is willing to do so. Let’s dive in and learn about some ways in which you can build and strengthen your leadership skills.
Study leadership
Attending workshops or pursuing a degree or certificate course can help you learn leadership. Training sessions can help you enhance your understanding of leadership whilst also helping you implement and improve your existing skills to their maximum potential. Many approved higher education institutions, and online platforms offer programmes that focus on these topic areas. Our Future Leaders Programme offered by the National University of Singapore could be a good place to start.
Assess yourself
Assessing oneself, one’s strengths, and weaknesses will aid one’s growth as a leader. Learning about yourself takes a lot of effort. Try to be absolutely honest with yourself throughout the process. Acceptance is key to achieving harmony with possibilities and limitations. Remember, that self-reflection is not a one-time process, but rather a continuous one where you have to put in work throughout. You could use self-assessment questionnaires or tests to aid you in the process. It is also important to remember to not be harsh on yourself and your many imperfections.
Identify areas that you would like to improve in depending on your leadership needs and expectations. Find ways to improve and practice these in situations whilst also keeping a good track of your strengths that will help you achieve your set goals.
Find a purpose that resonates with you
We cannot execute plans when we do not know the “why” behind them. In this regard, finding your true north is essential. Every individual creates their own meaning and purpose to the things they do, and it is important for a leader to find theirs too. Understanding your purpose is at the heart of leadership; in essence, it is who you are. At times when your path feels difficult, your purpose will give you the strength to live it.
Seek guidance and support from other leaders
Being open to being helped and being led is a characteristic of many great leaders we know. It may be useful to seek the guidance of an experienced person in your life, be it your manager or someone else you trust. The concept of modeling is powerful and can teach you and help you in your journey of learning leadership. Assessing someone else’s journey can help you ask questions like how they got there? What kind of attitudes and ethics do they possess? What purpose do they believe they fulfill? And so on. You can utilize this information to set your own path. Seeking help and guidance also means that you get feedback that could go a long way.
Take up responsibility
Responsibility is a trait exhibited by the most successful leaders. Responsible leaders exhibit their own set of values and ethics that make them unique in a variety of ways. It has an impact on how a leader interacts with subordinates, teams, and superiors in an organization. Taking up roles of responsibility will provide you with the opportunity to implement your skills and gauge where you need to improve. It might also make you feel seen and heard. Taking up responsibility demonstrates an idea of taking up challenges and leaders are summoned to accept and overcome them.
Hone your communication skills
Simply talking a lot is not necessarily communicating and most of us struggle with explaining ourselves effectively to our peers. This is why it is preconceived that only extroverts can become great which is obviously not true because communicating and speaking are not interchangeable terms. Effectively articulating oneself is a key skill that will help you overcome challenges, grow, and succeed. No leader can work alone and effective communication builds strong and harmonious teams.
Implement and practice!
Developing the correct plan and establishing significant benchmarks along the way will provide you with a road map, but nothing will come to fruition if you don’t implement these learnings. Try to implement techniques if you’re already in a leadership role. If not, you can still take up positions of responsibility in your team or organization or help run a non-profit organization, for that matter. The possibilities are endless. Learning leadership is one thing, but the leadership that you embody will help you go a long way.
