Leadership: Top Skills & Qualities For Workplace Success In 2022
It’s hard to argue with the fact that every company’s successful workflow largely relies upon the leadership of its managers. Which means that if anyone wants to lead and manage staff competently, this person needs to showcase strong leadership abilities. Most organizations list leadership as key to their long term success and also admit that there is a shortage of good leaders today. Hence, good leadership skills can open many doors and create endless career opportunities.
Despite the common misconception that leadership is something that pertains to inborn personal qualities, not all these qualities belong to natural sense of authority and personality traits. In fact, most leadership skills can be developed through learning and with enough of real life practice.
In this blog post, let’s talk about what leadership skills lead to success at the workplace and how one can develop or improve them in 2022.
How to describe leadership in an easy way?
Strong leadership is a key to successful management. How? To answer this question, one needs to take a look at the definition of the word “leadership”. The term “leadership” was probably best described by Brian Braudis, human potential expert and author of a well-known book “High Impact Leadership”. Here is how he described the concept: “Leadership is tangible energy which optimizes efforts of others toward goals or a mission.”
In other words, a good leader recognizes skills & qualities in others first and then turns gold into diamonds. A good leader focuses on people to motivate them, inspire, and make them more confident. He guides them to new levels and achievements. A good leader takes a stand despite contrary opinions, delivers a unique vision. Moreover, he/she is never afraid to speak up.
Successful leaders are good at encouraging others to have the fortitude to follow their passion. But to actually have leadership ability, some had to walk through the fire themselves. Many successful leaders lost everything at some point, had to rebuild it all from scratch, and started all over again with a clean slate. True leaders never break under a heavy load of circumstances but only become stronger and more strategic.
At the same time, good leaders know how to put ego aside and withstand along with coworkers while taking their ideas into consideration. Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE), once made a great statement about leadership: “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” That’s leadership!
What leadership qualities lead to success?
So, what generates leadership energy and turns it into a driving force? An answer is: leadership qualities! The best leadership qualities are delegation and lifting. But if you’d take these two qualities and melt them into one, you’d get complete fearlessness. Read what famous George Bernard Shaw once said in regards to fearless leadership quality: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, the progress depends on the unreasonable man.” What a great quote.
With all that said, a fearless leader should not be afraid to delegate, nor be afraid to support others.
Most leadership qualities can also be shaped into 1 word: PATHBUILDERS. Here’s how to decode this:
Principles – having a core set of values
Act – not being afraid of taking risky steps
Trust – having trust & believe in your peers
Honest – being transparent and open minded
Bold – not being afraid of innovations
Upbeat – staying positive
Integrity – being ethical & fair
Loyal – earning trust from colleagues and having their backs
Decisive – coming up with timely decisions
Enlighten – communicating promptly but appropriately
Recognize – being thankful to your employees
Serve – being supportive and providing colleagues with whatever they need
We believe honesty is one of the most important qualities of leadership since people usually want to be led by someone they can trust. Honesty helps to connect to your team and build a strong bond while overcoming obstacles together. You can learn more about the ins and outs of Practical Leadership with the Complete Guide to Great Leadership available on the Grinfer platform. Check it out!
What about leadership skills?
Even though there is no such a thing as a particular “set” of skills that works for everybody and can turn you into a successful leader in the blink of an eye. In reality, each individual has its own personal formula. So, do your homework and research what qualities managers/team leaders need today in your professional field. And then learn how to exercise these qualities.
Here’s some top leadership skills that you can easily learn & develop in 2022:
- Good communication skills
- Emotional intelligence
- Confidence & Persistence
- Decision making skills
- Creativity
- Strategic mindset
- Agility
- Networking
Communication skills. Good leaders need to know how to clearly address priorities, delegate, empower, and give timely feedback. Obviously, having excellent communication skills becomes essential since personalization of the message to each person is important. If you can’t get your point across, pretty much nothing else matters. By being clear about your ideas, and being able to deliver your vision, context, directives properly bring the desired results. Those managers who are all over the place, especially when it comes down to communication, rarely build a strong leadership. And that’s a proven fact, believe it or not.
Emotional intelligence basically means empathy. Having empathy is a key to becoming a well-liked leader at the workplace. This refers to an ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Experience shows that most people struggle with this high-value leadership trait. So, it is time to start developing this skill immediately. For example, we’ve got plenty of very useful courses on Grinfer in the Personal Development category that teach how to take different perspectives, viewpoints, and broaden your horizon in terms of getting on to the mindful path to emotional intelligence. Learn from these courses and you’ll start to understand people better and know how to approach others to have their back.
Confidence. What is confidence in the case of leadership? That’s when you don’t let mistakes discourage you from getting back up after some failures and risks along the way, you’ll get an excellent reputation of being a persistent leader. However, it’s also very important to stay away from playing the so-called “blame game”. Confident leaders take active responsibility for problems and come up with effective solutions for their team. They accept blame if something goes wrong without pointing fingers and blaming others. This definitely earns respect from coworkers. Therefore, learn how to accept mistakes and failures, how to devise clear solutions, and make effective improvements. And that’s what successful leaders do!
Decision-making skills. Mostly, this is about being a good listener. Leaders need to be good listeners for everyone – from customers to business colleagues. They need to listen to what other people say and not just hear it. Listening also helps leaders get multiple perspectives for the current problem. After making a decision, a good leader always listens to a number of different opinions and then makes the final decision.
Creativity. This is about being able to see beyond the present moment, and look ahead into the future. Or into the potential future that you’d like to create. This takes some wisdom and out-of-the-box thinking. And an understanding of cause and effect, as well as knowledge of the end result of where you want to go.
Strategic skills. This is about creating and implementing effective business strategies which allow leadership to be effortless. Part of it is to be able to hand off leadership to another person seamlessly. In order to do that properly and effectively, strategies must be built that can be handed down along with your position. For instance, such strategies can be about preparing or managing corporate events, delegating, hiring employees, paying scales, preparing reports, or even creating new positions, implementing new ideas, building new products, or taking the right paths to future business goals.
By implementing effective strategies, rather than leaving things up to chance, a good leader makes the process of leadership simpler, and enables another person to step into your shoes and easily pick up from where things were left off to deliver results that have been already set forth in the past well into the future.
Agile mindset. The truth is that mishaps with the last-minute changes & alterations always occur at workplaces because that’s an inseparable part of any workflow. So, good leaders always leave enough room for flexibility and accept whatever sudden changes come their way while moving ahead with creative problem-solving skills and an agile mindset. This means compassion, understanding the hearts, goals, and struggles of those who you’re leading. An agile mindset is the cornerstone to face difficult tasks and inspire colleagues to generate ideas for future achievements. Learn more about developing an agile mindset for future-minded leadership with online courses on Grinfer!
Networking skills. Since a huge chunk of business success is relationship driven, learn all the secrets of successful networking. This is about fostering a solid foundation of trust from both employees and your clients. If you’d strengthen relations internally, you’ll reap success as a leader in external relations too. Work on your networking skills and master them to perfection because this is more than just a trend for any business environment in 2022.
Can you obtain strong leadership skills through learning?
Yes, leadership skills are teachable, as well as learnable. This is pretty much out of the question. While some aspects of leadership can be learned fast, others might take more time/effort.
In fact, often people get appointed to leadership positions just because they exhibit qualities that people associate with leadership. Many such people, who are appointed to leadership positions because of their inborn qualities and personality traits, fail as leaders. One of the reasons is because they do not know how to inspire a vision, deal with conflict, empower people, or encourage employees. Even if they’re the most skilled at their jobs, great athletes, or excellent communicators and these traits do help them become leaders. In actuality, they still need to learn how to hold the ground no matter what’s going on around them.
Although some people have leadership traits naturally, this doesn’t mean that leadership is meant only for them. Leadership is not an idle thing. You need to know how to modify leadership abilities and adjust them to certain situations. If you learn how to analyze any tough situation and understand what is needed to resolve any problem, you’ll lead your team to success.
The truth is that, in the case of leadership, it’s not so much the repetitive practice that improves your leadership skills (even though it works in other cases). This is rather about being exposed to a wide variety of different situations where leadership abilities become essential. However, keep in mind that odds are you’ll have to make some behavioral changes.
You can start working towards your goals easily with online courses on Grinfer created by certified coaches and business owners. All of them share gems of extensive practical experience in leadership and valuable knowledge with anybody who wants to learn and achieve results.
Bottom-line
Leadership is a tough job mainly because you can’t please everyone and there’s always something (or someone) will try to bring you down. Yes, some people are incredibly charismatic and others follow them even if they lead to disaster. Others may go through quite a struggle. And then later realize they weren’t happy in a leadership role and it didn’t work out for them. But one thing is very clear – leadership skills can be learned and developed over time by practicing day in and day out. Just like any other skill, right?
Learn because learning will help you discover your talents and identify your ambitions. Focus on your talent to create something ambitious and unique to offer to the world.
Again, if you wish to develop leadership skills and learn in-depth how to master them to perfection, go ahead and follow leaders on Grinfer! Once you understand the basic concepts behind the leadership, you’ll be able to apply your skills over a period of time in work settings learning even more from your personal experience.
