According to John C. Maxwell, "Grow the Leader, grow the organization. A company cannot grow without until its leaders grow within. So, as you continue to hone your leadership skills and switch out your weaknesses and threats for strengths and opportunities, exploring how to improve one’s leadership skills is essential. CPR's Moral Leadership Coaching tidbit episode #14 offers four recommendations for building and honing your skills.
As a subscriber to the CPR Moral Leadership Coaching series, you will quickly determine that CPR's first eight episodes captured the importance of learning, growing, and ultimately transforming as a leader. In a 2021 Forbes article, Ms. Prossack offered four ways to Improve Your Leadership Skills. Let's explore together.
1-Be willing to learn. This can’t be forced.
“Just because you're successful in one role doesn't immediately give you the knowledge, skills, and subject matter expertise in the other,” explains Janson. The capabilities are there because you’ve been promoted, but there’s always room for growth and development.
2-Have a plan for personal growth and development.
To grow as a leader, you must prioritize learning and have a plan for your professional development. No matter how busy you are, there’s always time to learn. Replace 10 minutes of aimless phone scrolling and instead read a book, read articles or watch a video on leadership. Better yet, schedule time for learning onto your calendar. Janson lives by the rule “plan the work and work the plan.”
When you create a plan for your development, you’re more likely to stick with it. So, follow the road map leadership building block series CPR has set for you on this platform. If you are new, it’s worth starting with episode #1 and building.
3-Master the three critical components of successful leadership.
The three critical components of leadership are leading yourself, leading a team, and leading the business. The best leaders show mastery of all three components.
Leading yourself: The best leaders are self-aware. They understand their strengths and weaknesses and work to improve skill gaps. They can also translate that learning into becoming a better and more effective leader.
CPR Moral Leadership Coaching series recommend all leaders must self-reflect. Self-reflect builds self-awareness, which builds self-check that allows you to self-correct.
Leading a team: To successfully lead a team, leaders must understand how to motivate, engage, and manage their employees. They must be able to give honest feedback, have difficult conversations, and provide support when employees need it. Remember, your employees will model your behavior.
CPR underscores the importance of leading by example to ensure your team models your behavior.
Leading the business: Leaders are responsible for producing results. To produce those results, leaders must be comfortable with strategy and change management and understand how to take calculated risks.
CPR recommends linking this to producing good fruits or alkaline fruits. What does your soil say about your leadership style?
4-Companies need to take an active approach to leadership development.
When employees are promoted into leadership roles, they don’t often receive leadership training, or the training they do receive is focused on processes and procedures. Leadership training is always a good investment, as more effective leaders create more effective teams and employees. Good leadership has a trickledown effect, just like poor leadership does. Companies must also identify talent and create a leadership pipeline to prepare people for promotion opportunities. People can plateau at specific points in their leadership journey, especially when moving into executive roles. Janson explains, “You've got to be quite intentional about diagnosing and assessing where [leaders] are and then figure out the gaps.”
In conclusion, knowledge is power. The more you know, the more you go; Grow, and GLOW! Invest in human capital starting with you. So, stay tuned to CPR's Moral Leadership Coaching tidbit series in the upcoming.
Warm Regards
CeeCee