Leadership skills. What the heck are they? Why are they important?
And how do you develop them if you don't already have them today? I'm Jenny Rae LaRue. I'm a former Bain consultant and I'm the managing director of Management Consulted.
And I'm here today to talk about eight key leadership skills that we help organizations train in. These are some of the major skills that if you have a deficit in them, you'll find that you're not promoted, you're not advanced, you don't have people that work under you, and you're not given full responsibility to take projects and run with them. We want to fix that.
And so I'm going to share with you today what these leadership skills are, how to pursue them through leadership training, and how to be a leader regardless of whether your position says that you're a leader or not. The first four leadership skills that we're going to talk about are are what skills. They're about what you do.
as a leader. And the second four skills that we talk about are how skills. They're about how you do something as a leader. The what skills are usually foundational skills.
You build them early in your career and you're able to execute on them over and over and over again. The how skills are maturity skills. They're skills that you build over time and you continue to progress in them the more experience you have.
Before we dive into the list, make sure you hit the subscribe button so that you can get this and other great content continuously delivered. delivered. Let's dive into the list of the what skills. What skill number one is communication skills.
Communication skills are vitally important. You need them, you have to train in them, and you need to continue to advance in them. What do communication skills involve?
Really three key things. Number one, how to build consensus. Number two, how to deliver with clarity. And number three, how to sell yourself inside an organization. And the good news is if there are gaps in any one of those communication skills for you, or members of your team, we've got trainings for all three of them.
The second key what skill is emotional intelligence, otherwise known as the emotional quotient or EQ. This is the ability to listen to and intuitively understand what other people inside an organization want and need. It also helps people differentiate between A, B, and C, three people on their team, or A, B, and C. three stakeholders inside an organization or A, B, and C, three people that are senior to them, all of whom they need to satisfy.
Having the understanding, using your emotional quotient of how to tailor your message, your style, or even your approach to different people is part of how you build success as a leader. The number three leadership skill is problem solving. It's great if you can communicate. It's fantastic if you understand what people need. But you also need to effectively solve problems inside an organization.
This is why at Bain, McKinsey, and BCG, one of your first roles is data analytics. Because you shouldn't have the ability just to communicate about other people's ideas. You need to know... the nuts and bolts about how you get the ideas on your own. What does that often involve?
Millions of lines of data manipulated to figure out what the key insights and trends are across an organization. You need problem-solving skills, and Excel and PowerPoint are two of the most crazily powerful tools that are out there. But you can also use Stat, you can use R, you can use all kinds of different amazing tools to develop those problem-solving insights. You can also use frameworks to break down problems, not just data analytics, because data doesn't itself solve a problem.
The structure that you think about the problem, the lens that you think through, is also critically important. The fourth leadership skill is decisiveness. This is something that people that are great at problem-solving often battle with in tandem.
You can figure out what the problem is. You can figure out Often more than one solution to the problem, choosing one, putting all your weight behind it, and going for it is critical and important. In fact, Amazon and their leadership principles calls this decide and commit. What do they mean by that?
They mean that there might be three great answers to a problem. Pick one that you think is the best, commit to it, and put your full weight behind delivery on it. Why does this matter?
All of these leadership skills that focus on the what of what you do are focused on getting things done. how to communicate effectively, how to have emotional quotients so that you inside an organization can tailor a message, how to problem solve and how to decide. Those effectively both help you figure out what needs to be done and also make it happen inside an organization.
Before we move on to the next set of four skills, make sure you subscribe so that you You can get more great content like this. In addition, if you want training on those what skills, we have a training called Pyramid Principle for Analysts and Pyramid Principle for Managers. It helps you break down how to communicate more effectively, how to intuitively identify and understand what people need, and how to make sure you're delivering with clarity what problems you want to solve. and what decisions you think should be made.
It's an incredibly effective tool that has transformed organizations globally. There are four more leadership skills that I want to talk about now. These are the how skills.
How skills you can start using as early in your career as you'd like, but they really become developed over time with some gravitas, some development of experience, and that constant practicing of nuance inside an organization. These are ultimately the reason why people get promoted. They're ultimately what makes someone effective inside an organization.
You might have seven problem solvers, but one person who's good at problem solving in a way that makes people feel included and valued. So let me walk through the four leadership skills that we call the how skills. These four how skills will enable you to drive organizational cohesion, which ultimately is one of the key measures of success.
Number one, trust and delegate. When you can effectively expand your capacity as a leader, that's when you get the authority to have other people work for you. What does it look like to trust and delegate?
Well, it looks like you taking time to train other people. It looks like you giving them clear goals and then a focus on a deadline, but not on methods. What does this mean?
Well, it means that you're avoiding the micromanagement process of other people. There were only two people I ever saw personally get get fired from Bain. And their key flaw was that they were micromanagers.
They did not effectively trust and delegate. So they couldn't communicate what they wanted in an effective enough way to leave someone who was a high powered, smart, intelligent, and motivated person to go get it done. If you don't trust and delegate, what you build inside an organization is a sense of apathy. Somebody else will tell me when I'm wrong.
So I won't do anything until I get there. Thank you. You don't build a sense of ownership in the people who work for you, and therefore you won't have progressive responsibility. And if you do, it damages the organization. The second leadership skill under our how leadership skills is integrity and character.
What does this mean? Someone told me once that you can never build a culture of apology inside a culture of criticism. What does that mean? It means that people who always point out other mistakes, Without acknowledging that they have made mistakes on their own, don't build the integrity in the character inside an organization to have their word trusted.
So you have to be Two-sided in a good way. You have to acknowledge when you're right and stick with it, and you have to also acknowledge when you're wrong. Integrity and character practiced consistently inside an organization builds leeway and builds capacity underneath you. The third leadership skill under the how leadership skills is humility. At Bain, I kind of thought this was funny when I reflected on it recently.
We used to say, leave yourself open to the one percent possibility that you're wrong. What that implied was that 99% of the time you were right, which is actually kind of insulting to a lot of people. 99% of the time, you're actually probably not right. It's more like 70 or 80% on a good day. But leaving yourself open to that possibility that you're wrong is how you behave in humility to an organization.
Letting someone else direct you, even if they're junior to you, is incredibly valuable and important. Why? It builds their ownership.
in the future of the organization. So humility leaves you open to the chance that you could be wrong. What's the problem?
Well, humility and skill number four that we talked about earlier in the what skills, decisiveness, often counteract one another. So you have to be both decisive and humble. at the same time.
It's an important but really tricky challenge for managers. Fourth and finally, under the how skills and eighth total under the leadership skills that we're talking about today is passion. And passion is something that you can demonstrate, but it's difficult to impart without using all of the other skills. If you're not a clear communicator, if you don't understand people, if you don't trust and delegate, then you're going to break down an an infusion of passion inside an organization.
But what we see is that people who are passionate about results, passionate about people, passionate about product. It's an X factor that multiplies their impact both in and outside organizations. And so that's one thing that you will be responsible for cultivating on your own. What can kill passion though inside an organization is misunderstanding, a short leash, so not having the freedom to cultivate and express and share your own ideas, and a constant sidelining of ideas that could rock the boat that could make a big difference inside an organization.
How do you effectively train in these skills? Are they just something you're born with? Are you just naturally good at the how?
No. In fact, we have a training that we call the GMC framework, the Ghost Mouse Cricket Framework. The Ghost Mouse Cricket Framework helps identify what types of people are residing inside an organization and how to deal with people who want to be communicated with in very different ways. Because if there's misunderstanding on a team, it's really difficult to trust and delegate. It's really difficult to give leeway for ideas.
It's really difficult to remain humble to the idea that you might not be wrong because somebody else just does things. way. So if you're interested in transforming your organization, we would love to share more information with you about our Pyramid Principle Training and our GMC Framework.
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