How To Improve Your Leadership And Management Skills

Are you responsible for staff performance? Here are nine types of management skills vital for leading a business to success that positively impacts the bottom line...

9 Leadership And Management Skills To Focus On For Business Success

For those who wish to improve their leadership and management skills, there are the nine essential skills to focus areas, as outlined below:

1. The willingness to make decisions
2. The courage to act upon those decisions once they are made
3. Clear, specific and worthwhile goals
4. Outstanding communication skills
5. Brilliant planning skills
6. Effective delegation
7. Resolution of conflict
8. The self-control /self-discipline that ensures an optimistic outlook
9. The ability to inspire positive emotions in the rest of the team

Becoming a better leader and manager evolves over time. It requires consistent work and dedication to personal professional development. The following article will explore the above nine points in more detail, and provide a map on how to improve your leadership and management skills.

Making Decisions

Your success depends upon your ability to make the right decisions. After all, you make decisions all the time, during your personal and professional life, from what to wear in the morning to who to delegate a task to. It’s no secret that those who succeed tend to make good decisions.

Those that make less than optimal decisions see less than optimal results. Therefore, successful leaders are ready, willing and able to make the right decision - Even if they are hard. But they must also have the courage and confidence to act on those decisions, once they are made.

Set Clear, Specific, And Valuable Goals

This is the next vital skill of leadership because leaders must lead people somewhere. Answering the question:

“What is going to be OUR GOAL?”

Is the most important decision a leader must make. In this instance, you must include not only yourself, but your colleagues as well.

Communication Skills

If we're not communicating, nothing is happening, right?

Good communication skills are essential for every leader because leaders must convince others of the value and benefit of intended goals. They must inspire other people to believe in a mission and motivate them to strive for its achievement.

To effectively develop your communication skills, it is worthwhile to enroll in leadership management courses taught by a business coaches well-known for teaching leadership and management skills.

Planning Skills

Your goals need tactical plans calculated with intent for achieving them. In turn, strategic planning is the next leadership skill you need to master. These things should be defined:

• What needs to be done
• When goals should be completed
• Where operations will happen
• How goals and sub-goals will be achieved

All need to be outlined, step-by-step. This is why great leaders are also great planners.

Delegating The Right Task To The Right Person

The plan must be implemented, and to do so, leaders must assign the right tasks to the right people. To do that with success takes knowing staff and their capabilities, as well as establishing trust.

The quicker managers and executives set patterns of delegation and follow-up, the better. It's easy to hesitate or delay doing it. However, effective delegation can be the most useful of essential leadership and management skills.

Performance Management & Conflict Management

Reality: Not everyone will follow the plan. Importantly: Not everyone will agree with the plan. What does that mean? Conflict is inevitable.

Executives and directors must handle conflict within their teams quickly and with minimal friction. After all, a divided house cannot stand. Unhappiness and division leads to lack of productivity, which negatively impacts a company's bottom line.

When processes get off-track, managers should be motivated to re-establish harmonious relationships as fast as possible.

Effective conflict management skills? Vital!

Team Inspiration And Motivation

CEOs and entrepreneurs need to tap into the emotions of their teams to inspire and motivate. They must also know how to dissipate any negative emotions such as:

• Doubt
• Fear
• Stress
• Anger
• Bitterness

When those feelings emerge, operations suffer.

Alternatively, those in leadership positions should inspire positive emotions such as:

• Ambition
• Enthusiasm
• Courage
• Trust
• Faith

And a sense of certainty.

This means leaders would do well to develop their skills as motivational speakers to successfully inspire and motivate their teams to high achievements.

Self-control, Self-discipline

Before leaders and managers can motivate and inspire others, they must first motivate and inspire themselves! These individuals are often held to high standards by their opponents and colleagues, so they must develop a mental toughness to succeed.

Are you responsible for the performance of others? Plan to become emotionally self-sufficient. Finding a peer group for insight and support will be helpful.

Born leaders do not seem to require others to motivate them or give them confidence because they instinctively brew their own strength and courage on their own.

Final Thoughts On Essential Management Skills For Leadership

Great leaders have an inexhaustible supply of self-confidence and optimism based upon a knowledge that they have developed the above skills. We'll review them again below:

1. The willingness to make decisions
2. The courage to act upon those decisions once they are made
3. Clear, specific and worthwhile goals
4. Outstanding communication skills
5. Brilliant planning skills
6. Effective delegation
7. Resolution of conflict
8. The self-control /self-discipline that ensures an optimistic outlook
9. The ability to inspire positive emotions in the rest of the team

What will be the most challenging for you?

CI