Do you have what it takes to be a leader? Everyone has a leader within, and no matter how strong or weak a person’s inherent leadership skills, those abilities will improve with learning and practice.
Leadership consists of specific competencies and behaviors, including vision, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, commitment and communication. Also, most leadership experts say that as important as the desire to lead, are the willingness to take risks and the need to achieve a result.
So as you take steps to unleash your leadership potential, consider some advice from nationally recognized experts in the field of leadership training and development.
Leading with a Vision
Strong leaders have the ability to create a compelling vision. In addition to being able to “see” what things will look like in the future, a leader with vision is able to describe the future and bring others into that picture, giving meaning to the work they do.
McDonald’s founder, the late Ray Kroc, pictured his empire long before it existed, and he saw how to get there. He invented the company motto - “Quality, service, cleanliness and value” - and kept repeating it to employees for the rest of his life.
A visionary leader assures that everyone is able to contribute in her own way and values the differences in those contributions. And, a visionary leader creates an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas.
Masterful Communication
The best leaders are powerful communicators. Strong leaders have mastered the skill of listening as well as the ability to influence outcomes. Merrie Spaeth, a leading consultant specializing in executive training and crisis communication management and former White House aide to President Ronald Reagan, urges her clients to approach communication with the same rigor they apply to other aspects of their business.
“Every leader aims for influence,” Spaeth explains. “The goal in becoming a more effective communicator isn’t to learn some magic list of rules. It’s to leverage your own strengths.”
Leading with Emotional Intelligence
Your emotions are contagious. If you lead with energy and enthusiasm, your organization or the team you manage will thrive. The opposite is also true. If, as a leader, you spread negativity and foster dissonance, you will create a workplace of struggle.
In “Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence”, bestselling author Daniel Goleman and co-authors Boyatzis and McKee, emphasize that making employees feel good (inspired and empowered) is the job a leader should do first. Leaders who get their employees emotionally engaged accomplish far more.
Goleman says that the best leaders maintain a style repertoire, switching easily between “visionary,” “coaching,” “affiliative” and “democratic” styles and making rare use of less effective “pace-setting” and “commanding” styles.
It’s never too late to take on the challenge of improving your leadership effectiveness. Personal traits certainly play a major role in determining who will and who will not be comfortable leading others, but it’s important to realize that many core leadership competencies and behaviors can be learned.
Women Don’t Ask
Often overlooked on the list of essential leadership competencies is the ability to negotiate well. And women notoriously lack this skill. According to Linda Babcock, Ph.D., negotiation expert and author of “Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide”, women are much less likely than men to initiate negotiation. Sometimes they don’t know that change is possible - they don’t realize that they can ask. Sometimes they are afraid that asking may damage a relationship. And sometimes they don’t ask because they’ve learned that society can react badly to women asserting their own needs and desires.
On Babcock’s Women Don’t Ask Web site*, she and co-author Sara Laschever report the following:- In surveys, 2.5 times more women than men said they feel “a great deal of apprehension” about negotiating.
- Men initiate negotiations about four times as often as women.
- When asked to pick metaphors for the process of negotiating, men picked “winning a ballgame” and a “wrestling match,” while women picked “going to the dentist.”
- Women will pay as much as $1,353 to avoid negotiating the price of a car, which may help explain why 63 percent of Saturn car buyers are women.
- Women are more pessimistic about the how much is available when they do negotiate and so they typically ask for and get less when they do negotiate - on average, 30 percent less than men.
- 20 percent of adult women (22 million people) say they never negotiate at all, even though they often recognize negotiation as appropriate and even necessary.
Ellen D’Amato is the CEO of The Central Exchange. You may contact her at 816.471.7560.
Article Source: http://www.flourishmagazine.com
Unleash Your Leadership Potential