The Core Leadership Skills You Need in Every Role
Leaders at different levels of the organization face different challenges. But whether you’re an individual contributor, a first-time manager, a senior executive, or somewhere in between, there are 4 leadership skills you need to learn and master.
These are timeless leadership skills needed by leaders throughout an organization, regardless of role, industry, or location. But the way you address each leadership skill, and what you need to learn or emphasize will shift as you move to higher levels and face new challenges. We call these core leadership skills the “Fundamental 4.”
The Core Leadership Skills Needed in Every Career
While there may not a definitive leadership skills list, every leader, regardless of role, should master these core leadership skills.
The “Fundamental 4” leadership skills are:
Self-Awareness,
Communication,
Influence, and
Learning Agility.
1. Self-Awareness. This means simply understanding your strengths and weaknesses, but gaining self-awareness is anything but simple. Self-awareness is one of the critical leadership skills for ongoing and long-term effectiveness as a leader.
2. Communication. It’s one of the most basic, across-the-board leadership skills all of us need to develop and refine during our careers. “Communicating information and ideas” is consistently rated among the most important skills for leaders to be successful. Communication is also embedded in a number of other leadership skills and competencies, including “leading employees,” “participative management,” and “building and mending relationships.”
Writing clearly, speaking with clarity, and using active listening skills are all part of the equation. As you move up the career ladder, it expands to behaviors such as encouraging discussion, building trust, conveying vision and strategic intent, and pulling people along with you. That’s why communication is so important for leaders.
3. Influence. Developing your influencing and leadership skills helps you to communicate your vision or goals, align the efforts of others, and build commitment from people at all levels. Ultimately, influence allows you to get things done and achieve desirable outcomes.
Influence can vary greatly at different levels in the organization. Knowing your stakeholders, or audience, is key. Do you need to influence your boss? Your peers? Direct reports? Customers? Each stakeholder has special concerns and issues, so various groups and individuals will require different approaches for influencing.
Early in your career, or in individual contributor roles, influence is about working effectively with people over whom you have no authority. It requires being able to present logical and compelling arguments and engaging in give-and-take. In senior-level or executive roles, influential leadership skills are focused more on steering long-range objectives, inspiration, and motivation.
4. Learning Agility. You need the ability to constantly be in a learning mode, to value and seek out the lessons of experience. To develop as leaders and as people, we need to be active learners. This involves recognizing when new behaviors, leadership skills, or attitudes are needed and accepting responsibility for developing them.
Learning agility involves learning from mistakes, asking insightful questions, and being open to feedback. It includes learning a new skill quickly, taking advantage of opportunities to learn, and responding well to new situations. For senior leaders, learning agility is also about inspiring learning in others and creating a culture of learning throughout the organization. Developing your learning agility is a part of strengthening your leadership skills, a necessary step to enjoy a long career.
Grow Your Core Leadership Skills for Every Role
When you’re thinking about adding the Fundamental 4 to your leadership skills list, keep in mind that each skill should be continuously improved, or “built on as you go.” To be effective, you continue to develop, adapt, and strengthen leadership skills throughout your career. As you gain leadership skills in one area, you’ll find there’s more to learn and practice in taking on new challenges and larger roles.
If you think you’ve “skipped over” any of the Fundamental 4 core leadership skills during your career, you won’t be as effective or fully develop your leadership potential. The good news is that with concerted effort, you can learn and improve skills you missed out on.
If you can identify gaps or weaknesses in your leadership journey, you have the potential to learn, grow, and change. With self-awareness, communication, influence, and learning agility as the core of your leadership skills development, you can be confident that you’re building for new opportunities and the next level of responsibility, because these 4 are core leadership skills needed for everyone and every career stage.