Developing Your Leadership Skills

Developing leadership skills, many of which have previously been detailed, is a challenging process wherein many factors come into play. Several key factors come into play when developing these skills, which help reach the goal of becoming a better leader.

Perhaps the most important of any of these factors is motivation. As with any goal, becoming a good and better leader is not achievable overnight; it is something that requires hard work and dedication. Many individuals have the will to have goals or dreams but lack the will and ambition to follow through on reaching those said achievements.

Motivation becomes perhaps the most deterministic factor in mastering the skills necessary to become a good leader—the motivation to succeed and achieve that goal. Self-motivation is the key to maintaining energy, staying focused, and balancing work and life. An essential aspect of maintaining your energy is understanding when you are at your best – morning, afternoon, or evening—scheduling together projects when your energy is at its peak. Staying focused on your goals can help your self-motivation. Still, by keeping your top objectives in mind, you can ignore or reject projects that will not advance those goals—finally, balancing work and life – family, friends, health, and spirituality. Complete focus on work leads to exhaustion and deprivation of self-motivation. 

Aside from self-motivation, confidence is another critical element of mastering your leadership skills. Great leaders are excellent communicators. They understand that communication must be frequent, constant, and adapted to each scenario. Leaders are good at communicating the “why:†Why is this the goal? Why are x, y, and z, our values? Leaders can, and will, tailor with communications to the audience they are addressing. For example, what is said to a board of directors will differ from what is expressed to managers, investors, or newly hired employees. 

Adapting communication-based on audiences leads to the following essential aspect of mastering your leadership skills: emotional intelligence. Good leaders understand their own emotions as well as the emotions of others. With this understanding comes the ability to make better decisions and connections with people. Emotional intelligence is comprised of the following:

• Self-awareness is recognizing and understanding emotions, needs, and concerns.
• Motivation, the ability to set and achieve goals without being told, includes persistence and resilience to overcome obstacles.
• Self-management is the ability to remain cool, calm, and collected when you do not want to.
• Relationship management is the ability to develop and maintain good relationships and to make connections with others that are mutually beneficial.

Lastly, mastering leadership skills requires influence. Leaders must be able to influence others to embrace their vision, achieve goals, and makes a connection with people. The ability to influence directly relates to emotional intelligence, communication, confidence, and motivation. Each element builds upon the other and is crucial to leadership and being a good leader.

References

Advanced Controller and CFO Skills: Leadership Styles; Change Management. e-book, Durham, NC, Association of International Certified Public Accountants, 2021.