Leadership Skills Lecture Notes

Introduction to Leadership Skills

• Speaker: Jenny Rae LaRue, former Bain consultant, Managing Director of Management Consulted.
• Focus: Eight key leadership skills necessary for career advancement and project management.
• Importance: Without these skills, promotions and career growth are limited.
• Structure:
  • What Skills: Skills about what you do.
  • How Skills: Skills about how you execute tasks.

What Skills (Foundation Skills)

1. Communication Skills

• Importance: Essential for leadership.
• Components:
  • Building consensus.
  • Delivering with clarity.
  • Selling yourself within an organization.
• Training Available: To address gaps in communication skills.

2. Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

• Definition: Ability to listen and understand others' needs and wants intuitively.
• Application: Tailoring messages and approaches to different stakeholders.

3. Problem Solving

• Necessity: Beyond communication, problem-solving skills are required to handle data and generate insights.
• Tools: Excel, PowerPoint, Stat, R, and frameworks for data analysis and problem structuring.

4. Decisiveness

• Challenge: Balancing problem-solving with the ability to make and commit to decisions.
• Example: Amazon’s "decide and commit" principle.
• Outcome: Facilitates effective action within an organization.

How Skills (Maturity Skills)

5. Trust and Delegate

• Expansion: Increases a leader’s capacity to manage.
• Practice: Train others, set goals, focus on deadlines, avoid micromanagement.
• Outcome: Prevents apathy and builds ownership.

6. Integrity and Character

• Culture: Avoid a culture of criticism to enable apology and trust.
• Practice: Admit mistakes and build organizational trust.

7. Humility

• Openness: Accept the possibility of being wrong.
• Effect: Encourages junior members to guide and contribute.
• Challenge: Balancing humility with decisiveness.

8. Passion

• Impact: Multiplies organizational influence.
• Importance: Cultivated through good communication, understanding, trust, and delegation.
• Obstacles: Misunderstanding and restricted autonomy can hinder passion.

Training and Development

• Training Programs:
  • Pyramid Principle for communication and decision-making.
  • GMC Framework: Identifies communication styles and improves team dynamics.
• Conclusion: Leadership skills can be developed and refined through targeted training.

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