Perhaps Rosalynn Carter, former First Lady of the U.S., said it best: A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be. In other words, it takes a person with a specific set of leadership skills and qualities to take a team from good to great. What skill and qualities, you ask?
Here are the top 12 qualities you want to have if your goal is to improve your leadership ability and become one of the extraordinary women making history.
#1 Be a Doer
This is one of the most important leadership qualities because it earns you respect from your team. When you are willing to do what you ask your team members to do, they hold you in higher regard and consider you to be “one of them.”
Plus, a sense of resentment can form if you ask them to do things that you aren’t willing to do yourself. It makes your team feel as if they are inferior, which squelches their desire to put in a lot of effort. So, be a doer, not just a sayer and you will have a greater chance of leading your team to victory.
#2 Have Follow-Through
To be a great leader, you have to have follow-through. Being known as a person who is all talk and no action isn’t going to get your team to progress. It is just going to earn you a reputation as someone who doesn’t live up to her promises.
If you say you’re going to do something then you need to do it. And if you can’t do it, then you owe your team an explanation as to why so that they don’t think that you simply chose to leave them high and dry.
#3 Show Confidence
When you don’t have confidence in your own leadership abilities and skills, you can’t expect others to either. That is why it is extremely important to show your self-assuredness so that your team knows that it is okay to have confidence in you as well.
This doesn’t mean that you have to know exactly what to do in each and every situation. However, you have to trust yourself to make the best choice possible in given situations if you want your team to learn to trust you as well.
#4 Bolster Passion
This made the list of top leadership skills and qualities because if you can’t keep your team energized and ready to forage forward, you’re not going to achieve greatness. You’ll sit stagnantly, unable to move.
Bolster your team’s passion by connecting them with your mission. Make them feel like a valuable part of the process and their heart will be more into the outcome.
#5 Promote Positivity
If you’ve ever had a group leader who was always a naysayer, focusing more on the negative then the positive, then you know how this can affect a team. It sucks the life right out of them and leaves them hopeless and depressed, and how can that bring about greatness?
To improve on this particular leadership skill, you want to concentrate on the positives of the situation or project and encourage your group to do the same. Keeping them (and yourself) in this type of mindset will add an energy that will surely lead to great things!
#6 Allow Creativity
Some of the most amazing ideas have been born out of creative, inquiring minds. Look at Mary Anderson who is credited with the invention of windshield wipers, or Ann Moore who came up with the idea of the Snugli baby carrier after watching women in South Africa carrying their children with cloth slings.
The more you tell your group to stick to a rigid set of rules or parameters, the less effective you will be. So, while it is great to offer up some basic guidelines and best practices, you should also encourage your members to be creative. Let them use their own ideas to make your project a greater success.
#7 Delegate Tasks Appropriately
A good leader delegates tasks, but a great leader delegates tasks according to the strengths of the team members. As the old saying goes, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.”
Therefore, you first need to identify the strengths of your team members. From there, figure out where they can utilize their strong points for the good of the team. Assign them duties that accentuate their best and you’ll get their best in return.
#8 Listen to Your Team
This is definitely one of the top qualities that great leaders possess. It involves both asking for feedback from the team and listening when it is received. If either of these is missing, your ability to communicate effectively goes downhill.
Remember that your team is on the front line so they likely know more than you do when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the project. This puts them in a better position to see potential problems before they occur since they have a detailed, up close look. And if you don’t ask for their feedback, you may likely miss a great opportunity to stop potential issues before they even start.
#9 Recognize Your Team
It is often said that a great leader does not take credit for the success of the team. Instead, they place the achievement where it belongs – on the individual members.
Certainly, they may have not got as far without you as their leader, but if you take all of the credit, you are reducing the likelihood that they will continue to work hard. However, if you give them all of the accolades, you’ll have the best group of workers you’ve ever seen!
#10 Back Your Team
Have you ever worked for someone who you knew would “throw you under the bus” if given the chance? It’s pretty demotivating isn’t it? That’s why you can improve your leadership skills by simply being the person who backs up her team.
When your team members know that you’ve got their back, they won’t be so afraid to go above and beyond. It decreases their worries and gives them more freedom to experiment a little.
#11 Keep a Sense of Humor
At some point, every project has a snafu that makes you want to scream or cry. However, neither is going to advance the group, so sometimes you just have to laugh and shake it off.
Keep a sense of humor when things aren’t going as planned. If you don’t, you’re going to create a negative environment in which everyone is so busy tiptoeing around you that they won’t have enough time (or energy) to get their work done.
#12 Have Integrity
This is the queen of leadership qualities, so if you remember only one thing from this list, let it be this. Above all, have integrity. Be a leader who is honest and moral and your team will respond in kind.
When you do something, do it right. Don’t take shortcuts or cheat someone else to get where you want to be. Always take the higher ground and teach your team to do the same. There is no success in getting someplace the dirty way.
Improve these 12 leadership skills and qualities and you’ll achieve amazing things. As a team!
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