Are Your Leadership Skills up to Scratch?

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These days, the approach to leadership skills seems to be akin to buying a bag of onions, plus a lettuce or two, and maybe a few tomatoes. Online leadership assessments have begun sprouting up like mushrooms. How well did you do in your last quiz?

Self-assessment has its place, but the real judgement is made by colleagues - and ultimately by the business. Did the results get delivered, on time, to budget, and in a way that fits the company ethos? Any leadership skills assessment needs to take these factors into account to be helpful to the individual seeking feedback to improve.

Improving leadership skills, based on a leadership skills test, can lead the individual to try and push forward on too many fronts at once. They may be thrust into a confusing mix of trying to improve interpersonal skills, decision making, thinking strategically, developing others, managing performance, negotiation, innovation, presenting with impact...the shopping list goes on.

There's no single success recipe - what works for a colleague, in one situation, may not work for you in yours.

The leadership skills mix is complex, with individual skills often impacting on each other. Some might argue that, beyond a basic minimum, there is really no point in polishing skills we have no aptitude at. For example, analytical skills may not be your forte, and perhaps will never be. If the job requires them, you may need to find a different role.

Good leadership ultimately relies on good relationships - but many, many factors enter that mix: organizational role, task or delivery demands, organizational history, vision and so on.

The start point for improving leadership skills is feedback from three perspectives:

the task - how well was it done?
yourself - how well did I do?
others - how well do they say I did?

Interestingly, a recent web search of leadership skills rarely suggested ‘seeking feedback' as a key skill, although occasionally ‘self development' did appear.

Projects can be a great leadership skills assessment test - but many leaders fail to maximise the potential of this superb opportunity for feedback and learning. And here comes step two - not only seeking feedback by reviewing how thought and action played out in the end - but actually taking it on board, considering it, learning and deciding how to do things in the future.

Comments

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Jacob Aldridge, 11 months ago

Isn't it interesting that so many 'leaders' who expect and enforce KPIs in their staff don't concern themselves with how they measure their own effectiveness and success? And I suppose that most of the leadership measurements that do exist are based on outcomes like Revenue / Profit / Share Price. I believe businesses and their leaders need to create and monitor some more telling indicators like staff energy and turnover, efficiency rather than outcome, and actual implementation of projects rather than the array of mixed items in their "shopping bag" skill set.