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 We've all questioned the strength of our leadership skills at one time in our career. If you've ever had the chance to supervise or manage a group you've probably wondered if the group members felt you were a leader. You may have even tried to guess if peers around you feel you're a leader. Perhaps you have even hoped that your boss sees the leadership skills that you possess.
Let's face it, to get ahead in the business world today you need to separate yourself from the pack. Competition is fierce. You can go to school and get yourself a college diploma; you can even get advanced degrees in very specialized areas. We're not arguing against the importance of an education - but in today's workplace this is more and more commonplace.
Leadership Skill and Career Growth
If you have specialized technical skills, they will only take you so far in your career. And that's what this article on leadership skills is going to address. You might be recognized as a specialist or even a subject matter expert. But without good leadership skills, it is very likely that you are only qualified to reach the end of a "technical" career path. There is even a term for people in those positions in an organization - individual contributors. And for many of us, we can feel very successful wearing that label.
But if you want more career growth options available to you, then you need to demonstrate effective leadership skills. Every hiring manager that fills an opening for a manger or supervisor hopes that person they are going to hire is a leader. But even managers that have successfully demonstrated that they can deliver superior results can have their careers derailed by weak leadership skills.
Skills and Characteristics of Leaders
A logical question would then be - What characteristics and / or skills that are found in leaders and how can they be learned? Well, we've all heard of the term "natural born leaders" but we've never thought that genetics had much to do with true leadership ability. People that display leadership skills early in life are probably just emulating someone very close to them - a father or mother - someone that has subconsciously taught them the right leadership skills.
In fact, nearly everyone exhibits leadership skills or characteristics or certain situations, perhaps in a work setting, at home or in the community. They are skills that are developed and honed over a lifetime and grow in complexity as our personalities grow. The trick then is to accelerate the leadership skills development process so that we are able to exhibit these characteristics at the appropriate times in our career.
That being said, this website has already published several articles that can help you to better understand the finer points of leadership and also give you some hints on how to further develop these skills:
Transformational Leadership
Our article on transformational leadership explains a concept that James MacGregor Burns developed describing these types of leaders. In particular the article covers the concepts of transformational leadership, transactional leadership, moral and amoral leaders.
Situational Leadership
Our article on situational leadership explains the four styles of leadership developed by Ken Blanchard - directing, coaching, supporting and delegating as well as the situational leadership model developed in Daniel Goleman's emotional intelligence. One of the key skills we talk about developing in situational leadership is the ability to flex your leadership style to the current work environment.
Leadership Styles
Finally, our article on Leadership Styles discusses the six leadership styles identified by Goleman. In that article, you will find descriptions outlining the most appropriate time to use particular leadership style. That article concludes with some hints on how to become skilled in the art of mastering multiple leadership styles.
Leadership Skills Training Programs
If you're interested in developing your leadership skills in a more compressed timeframe, then you might want to take a look at our publication on Leadership Training. Here you'll find some practical advice on the basics of leadership training programs as well as where you can go to find some very effective executive leadership training courses.
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