6 Skills Every Leader Must Master in 2022
By Jayson Krause, Managing Director of Level 52 & Author of The Science Behind Success
Despite what people say, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Neuroplasticity shows us that despite your age and experience, you can re-skill and add to your tool belt to meet the challenges ahead of you. The world is changing, business is rapidly changing, and what’s now required for leaders to inspire results is also changing.
Dr. Anne McKee, Professor of Neurology and Pathology at Boston University writes:
“People in business want to work with those they trust and relate to. ‘How’ a leader engages is becoming more important than ‘what’ a leader knows. There’s a different mindset and skill set needed for today’s workforce where information is accessible at the touch of a screen. Partnering skills and resonant leadership are becoming essential as hierarchy structures erode and collaboration increases within organizations.”
Leveling up both your leadership operating system, along with your toolset is going to make you or break you as an effective leader inside your business. You can ignore the rapid change and continue to bury your head in your spreadsheets, or you can embrace discomfort and engage in developing the skills to stand out, maximize your impact, and make yourself indispensable.
The 6 things I share in this article may seem simple, but their importance shouldn’t be underestimated. I’ve been in the executive coaching and leadership-development field for almost fifteen years, working with senior leadership teams in a variety of industries, who immediately saw tremendous value once they applied the skills, and all of them wished they’d learned these skills earlier in their career.
So, what if you’re not in a leadership position?
It doesn’t matter. You can add immense value and build followership well before you have any direct reports whatsoever. This way, you bypass the desire for a self-serving, meteoric rise in your career, and you demonstrate what real, meaningful leaders do.
Many young professionals feel like they lack the soft skills required to network, build client relationships, and collaborate with confidence–especially with senior leadership. Yet, communication skills and networking prowess are still the primary traits that get people noticed and promoted in a competitive market.
Here are the 6 skills to begin mastering, right now:
1. Listen
“Leaders who don’t listen will soon be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.” – Andy Stanley
I’m sure you don’t need to learn how to listen. You listen all the time. The question is, where are you focusing your attention when you listen? Like most people, you’re likely well-developed in the area of competitive listening. When other people are talking, you begin problem-solving or scripting your response in your head–not fully taking in the information before responding. This leaves people feeling unheard and dissatisfied.
The majority of the population does this, so don’t sweat it. But be aware of it and seek to change it.
If you want to differentiate yourself, start focusing your attention on discovery listening–really soaking in what others have to say. When you do this, people feel heard, and when they feel heard, they feel valued. When they feel valued, they put in real, discretionary effort to deliver value for you and the organization.
2. Great Questions
If you want high-quality performance from those you work with, you need to get damned good at asking high-quality questions.
When someone reaches out to you for help to navigate a challenge, rather than try to fix their problem, you can support their growth by asking good questions. Learn to use appreciative inquiry, and ask great, high-impact questions. Not only do people love it, but it also expands their awareness, giving them greater insight into how they make decisions and what they value. When leaders bypass problem-solving and ask powerful questions, they begin to scale their leadership and have a greater impact by expanding the people they work with.
3. Engineer Your Relationships
We engineer buildings, bridges, factories, and software to ensure they are safe, efficient, effective, and highly reliable. Why don’t we apply the same principles when it comes to developing reliable relationships? Leader or not, you will greatly benefit from taking the time to learn other people’s default operating systems. What makes them tick? What drives them crazy? Ask them about past work experiences that have brought out their best– will give you great insight into what they value. It will also help to get all of the assumptions out of the way between the two of you. If you know you turn into a jerk when it’s crunch time, tell them that. You can even enroll them into letting you know so you can develop greater awareness around it. It’s a win-win approach that builds trust and psychological safety because they know where you stand and what you stand for.
Engineering conscious relationships, colleague-to-colleague or manager-to-direct report, will help you create the conditions for success, now and in the future. That’s leadership at its finest.
4. Use the F-word
This F word has nothing to do with uttering profanities in the workplace. As highly intelligent beings that can code robots and launch spaceships, it still baffles me how knuckle-dragging most professionals are when it comes to giving feedback.
Feedback is an essential development tool, but so few do it well. It’s a foundational element to help athletes improve, and yet, in business it often gets pushed to mid-year reviews, if at all. When feedback is given, the quality is usually poor at best. If you want to gain the trust of the people you work with, provide great, honest feedback. They will begin to come to you because they know you shoot straight and help them accelerate their career development.
Feedback is one of the greatest gifts you can give others. Just make sure you engineer how they want to receive feedback together, because even though it’s essential, it can still hurt if you haven’t earned the right to shoot straight.
5. Clarity
Poor communication and a lack of clarity cost organizations millions of dollars each year. When leaders move at a fast pace, they allow “busy” to be the reason they don’t communicate clearly. They expect people around them to read their minds, and the primary thread of communication is laced with heavy assumptions due to the lack of quality information. Assumptions lead to drastic disappointment and costly mistakes for your organization.
Learning the skills required to bring clarity to your boss or your team will enable you to cut through the fog of business warfare and create successful results.
6. Become an Agent
Everything cascades from your mindset. Whether you are aware of it or not, you are either an object of your organization or an agent in your career.
An object waits to be told what to do, waits for approval, and waits to be noticed and promoted. An agent takes risks based on what they believe, asking for forgiveness rather than permission. An agent doesn’t ask for approval, they ask you what you need to see in order to say yes. They don’t wait to get noticed and promoted, they do things that stand out, and they ask you what you need to see from them to make the next promotion easy.
Agency isn’t arrogance; it’s freedom. It’s understanding that you are in full control of accelerating your career when you embrace and exercise the right mindset.
Objects complain about their boss and then quit to find a better job. They soon find out that their old problems have followed them into their new role because even though their job has changed, they haven’t. An agent identifies and meets their problems head-on. They experiment with different strategies and treat their challenges as a metaphorical dojo that better prepares them for their next battle.
Agents change the game while objects wait for it to start. Embrace and exercise your agency, and you’ll change your career.
Business and leadership are rapidly changing. Reskilling is critical as existing leaders have to keep up with what the workforce needs and those striving for a management position will benefit greatly by growing their abilities early on. Why wait until you are a manager or senior leader to begin mastering these essential skills? The sooner you dive in and start practicing these with those you work with, the sooner you will begin to master them–accelerating your influence, impact and career trajectory.
Want to really grow these skills? Join one of our award-winning Accelerated Leader Programs for experienced leaders.
