What are leadership skills?
Leadership skill is the application of personal capacity, experience, experience and knowledge to orient and motivate members to act towards common work goals.
Unlike management, leaders are like "captains", "head of the ship" who always know how to control the ship to reach the destination successfully. Therefore, people who possess leadership skills often have foresight, good strategic thinking and good management skills.
The importance of leadership skills
At work: Without leadership skills, your team will be like a boat sailing without a captain. You will not be able to:
- Lead the team to the common goal of the business
- Unable to define vision, strategy and direction of people
- Unable to assemble a team of good and loyal personnel
- Becoming an Untrusted Leader
- Unable to optimize work efficiency as well as promote team strength
In life: If you do not practice leadership skills, you will not be able to lead yourself, leading to unnecessary indulgence. This will affect the quality of your life, your relationships, and your career.
How to practice and develop skills
Research the right leadership style
To develop a leadership training method, you need to determine the leadership style that is right for you.
Here are 8 popular leadership styles today:
- Democratic Leadership: This style manifests itself in soliciting opinions and making final decisions, similar to how decisions are made in shareholder meetings. This will create opportunities for employees to promote the authority and leadership capacity at the current position.
- Autocratic Leadership: With this style, you will be the one to make all the decisions without consulting anyone under. Employees will have to comply with your decision.
- Laissez-Faire Leadership: You will give almost all authority to the subordinates you trust. You will be in a position to monitor progress, optimize as well as guide staff. This will improve the autonomy, management capacity and promote creativity of employees.
- Strategic Leadership: This style aims to balance the goals of the company, management, and employee development opportunities.
- Transformational Leadership: With this style, you and your team will always be ready to "transform" and improve according to company goals. This will help maximize employee capacity when continuously achieving higher goals.
- Coach-style Leadership: Focuses on identifying and nurturing each team member's strengths. At the same time, it also focuses on how to work collaboratively among team members. In the long run, team members will develop an area of expertise or soft skills.
- Transactional Leadership: This style is evident in rewarding employees according to their performance. This will help establish roles and responsibilities as well as motivate employees for different tasks.
- Bureaucratic Leadership: This is a rule-following leadership style. You will listen and receive input and change the rules as needed. After that, all activities in the team or company follow the agreed set of rules.
Take every opportunity to become a leader in training
You don't have to go to work to have the opportunity to be a leader. Right on the school chair, you can completely apply to be the leader of a subject, a certain club and lead the members to a common goal. This is the best way for you to hone your direction, strategy and team mentality.
Constantly practicing critical thinking
To possess good leadership skills, you will need to be equipped with the ability to react to any problem. Criticism here is not arguing about an issue, but you need to provide reasonable, logical, and convincing rationales.
How to practice critical thinking in life as well as while studying and working in groups:
- Believe in your own abilities
- Ready to accept the new
- Always evaluate problems from many perspectives, objectively
- Make assumptions around what people are talking about
- Use factual evidence
- Limit compromise when arguing
Practice creative skills, always come up with ideas
To improve your leadership skills, you also need to develop your creativity. Because once you become the leader, you will need to guide the members on the right way, the right way to communicate, the idea of a new solution.
Ways to help you hone your creative skills:
- Find the “golden” creative time.
- Regularly jot down ideas, even when bathing or eating.
- Get up, go out for inspiration.
- Constantly thinking about finding ideas and solutions to current problems.
- Meet and talk with highly creative people.
- Be willing to listen for change.
Improve your listening skills, teammates
In addition to persuasive and critical skills, listening skills are essential for you to become a good leader. Listening here is not only listening to suggestions from others to improve themselves and their work, but also listening to understand team members. From there, grasp the current situation in the most general way and offer solutions.
- Some tips to improve listening skills:
- Focus on the conversation and actively listen.
- Do not interrupt the person who is speaking.
- Do not judge, tease or impose your thoughts on the other person.
- Ask appropriate questions, avoid pressuring the other party with aggressive questions.
- Flexible use of body language.
Ready to take responsibility
One of the key skills of a leader is taking responsibility for undesirable outcomes, or taking responsibility for handling internal conflicts. You can find opportunities to stand out and solve the smallest problems of yourself, of relationships in the family, in class, in the department and in the company. This will help you gain more experience as a leader.
Above are the experiences of training and developing leadership skills from Vietnam Manpower. Hopefully, the article will help you have a better view of this skill as well as identify the right leadership style for you. Good luck!
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