Leadership Qualities

Your organization has a brilliant CEO and a great team doing a good job. While it is okay to bask in the knowledge that you are in safe hands, there is an important question to consider: for how long? People quit, market conditions change and businesses expand – all these and many more conditions will require you to be prepared with a second tier of qualified and trained staff. Leadership training is what you need in order to make sure you are equipped to handle such situations.

Training people to develop technical expertise is one thing; leadership training quite another. A person cannot grow into a leader overnight – besides exposure to the right form of executive coaching, he also needs to soak in certain qualities and adopt them in his daily functioning. Here are three qualities that successful leaders use – mirroring these qualities can help fledgling leaders gain some of the attitudes that determine how good a job they do as leaders.

1.Use the Right Words

The words we use determine the nature of our thoughts and our moods; more importantly, they also determine the thoughts and attitudes of people around us. Try a small experiment. Say to yourself, “I made a huge mistake,” and then, “I learnt from this experience,” and observe the way you feel. While the first sentence makes you feel low, the second one makes you feel positive. This is an important distinction and one that all good leaders know. Always make it a point to use words with positive connotations and cut out the negative-sounding words from your vocabulary. For example, how does “problem” sound versus “challenge” or “workers” against “colleagues” or “deadline” versus “target?”

3.Delegate Responsibilities

Agreed, it can generate a lot of insecurity to hand over an important task to someone else, but this is a fear that all leaders have to ultimately overcome. Much of the process of leadership training involves learning how to delegate responsibility. Most people respond positively when you hand over some new responsibility because by delegating, you are implying that you trust them to do a good job. Where necessary, provide instructions and some training and ensure the person understands specifically what is expected before delegating tasks.

3.Encourage Independent Thinking

Good leaders are not people who provide all the answers; they are the ones who ask the right questions to get their protégés thinking to find the solutions. It is important for leaders to learn to encourage staff to discuss the challenges they face and then have them think of different ways out of these difficulties.

Executive coaching programs need to focus on imparting knowledge of these qualities to participants. Armed with these, even the most unassuming of staff can grow to develop the qualities important to lead your organization in today’s competitive business environment.