Leadership skills are critical if you’re an ambitious professional and you want to move into leadership at some stage in your career.
Nowadays it’s too easy to be overlooked for leadership positions if you don’t have the necessary leadership skills you need for the position you want.
I know if you’re reading this that you fit into the “ambitious” category and it’s likely you want to succeed in your career.
But you may have asked yourself, “Why do I even need to learn leadership skills?”.
In this week’s blog post and below videos, I’m sharing with you my top five reasons as to why leadership skills are important.
1. Employers Look for Leadership Skills When Promoting
Yes, you read that correctly. You might not think employers look for leadership skills when promoting, but they do. They might not tell you they look for leadership skills when promoting, but I can assure you, they do.
Employers begin looking for these skills or the promise of leadership ability in the making early on in your career.
From the resume stage when you’re applying for a job, your cover letter, the interview, your LinkedIn profile, on-the-job work experience and interactions with coworkers.
In all of these situations employers are looking for skills in leadership or the promise of them.
What this means for you is the faster you can learn them, the better is it for you. And the faster you can advance in your career.
Whether you’re in your 20s, 30s or 40s, if you haven’t yet invested time or energy into developing your leadership skills, now is the time to start. It’s never too late.
As the saying goes, the best time for planting a tree was yesterday. The second best time for planting a tree is today.
2. They Help Create a Vision, Direction & Goals
One of the responsibilities of a leader is to create a vision, big picture and goals for the team or the company. This is one of the major differences between being a manager and being a leader.
Managers deal with the day-to-day tasks and activities. Whereas leaders deal with the big picture and goals.
Companies and teams need goals to work towards. They need goals to give people in their team direction and focus in their day to day activities.
Without goals, people just wander all over the place and achieve nothing.
Think about this in relation to your life. If you had no goal for your career, what would you have achieved? If you have no goal for exercise, how fit would you be?
When it comes to leadership, goals, direction and a big picture are essential. If you have this ability, you have an edge over your competition when it comes to promotions.
And you have the skills that are important in leadership.
3. They Move People Toward a Common Goal
Once you have the big picture or vision, the leader is also responsible for moving people and motivating them toward achieving that vision.
The ability to motivate people toward a larger goal or vision is why leaders are so valuable to companies and why leadership skills are important.
If you don’t give people a direction to go in or a good reason to move in that direction, people will do their own thing.
There won’t be any cohesion in the team. People won’t work together. They will be scattered and dispersed.
As a result, your leadership goals will not be met.
Most successful companies are just that, successful, because they have a group of people moving in the same direction.
This is what gives a team and the company strength. And this is what makes leadership skills essential.
4. Leadership Skills Empower People to Reach their Full Potential
One of my favourite parts of leadership is supporting and empowering people to reach their full potential.
Helping them overcome their insecurities and blocks like the Impostor Syndrome or self-doubt.
I feel the most rewarding part of leadership is seeing people who didn’t think they could achieve great things, actually achieve great things.
As a leader, it’s your job as a leader to look beyond these insecurities and support, guide and convince your team they are capable of amazing things.
When you believe in them and empower them like this, it will come back to you tenfold.
But empowering and truly supporting people doesn’t come naturally to many. It requires a special skill-set.
You need to be good at communication, motivating and influencing people, and develop a coaching style of leadership to support and empower your team.
These are skills that leaders possess and are essential if you want to succeed in leadership.
In this video I talk about some of these skills I just mentioned. Watch Essential Leadership Skills to learn more.
5. Leadership Skills Fast-Track Your Career Success
Leadership skills absolutely do fast-track your career success.
As I mentioned at beginning of this blog post, employers look for leadership skills even when you’re early in your career.
If you can show early on in your career that you have leadership ability (not necessarily all leadership skills, but ability and aptitude for leadership), employers will notice this and it can put you on a fast-track for promotions.
What I recommend for you is to start learning leadership skills as soon as you can. Don’t wait until you reach a leadership position to show you have leadership ability. This is too late.
Somebody else could have been chosen for that leadership role instead of you because they revealed and showcased their leadership ability much earlier on.
If you want to know which skills you need to equip yourself with, watch this video.
Above all, I want you to leave this one last message:
Leaders are not born. Leadership is a skill that you must learn and grow into.
Take a look at the above videos where I delve deeper into this content.
Thank you for reading!
Kara
