3 Powerful Tips for Enhancing Your Leadership Skills

Have you just been promoted into a leadership position and don’t know where to start? Or perhaps you’ve been at it awhile, but want to improve your skills. There are many things effective leaders have adopted as part of their practice:

1. They continuously learn.

2. They have a reflection process and ask for feedback.

3. They cultivate their emotional intelligence.

None of these can be taken on their own, but rather, they work best together as they all tie in to a successful leadership skillset. Someone who learns continuously asks for feedback and reflects. Seeking and evaluating feedback cultivates emotional intelligence. Reflection is a critical element of learning and improving.

A growth mindset is essential for each of these practices. In her TED Talk, The power of believing you can improve, Carol Dweck describes a growth mindset as believing your abilities can be improved. She contrasts a growth mindset with a fixed mindset in which you believe you are born with certain abilities (or not), and you cannot learn or improve.

Continuously Learn

Effective leaders invest in leadership development programs proactively. They seek out opportunities to learn and improve, whether through seminars, conferences, workshops, webinars, coaching or mentoring. They consume books, podcasts, TED Talks and other learning opportunities.

Learning does not always need to be formal accredited courses or conferences. There is a plethora of online webinars and free courses you can take. Check out your professional organization, LinkedIn, or other leaders. Many offer a free version of some of their content.

An element of continuously learning is to push yourself just past your comfort zone.

Learning from our failures is important too. Dweck talks about the power of “not yet” as part of growth mindset. Recognizing that something didn’t work the way we wanted to, but that’s normal, and we have the opportunity to keep trying is critical.

If you’ve ever watched a young child learn to walk, you will notice that they don’t just get up one day and run across the room. They practice standing and falling. They will grab onto a couch or table and take steps while holding on. Then, with encouragement and outstretched arms, they may take a few tentative steps. Eventually they can walk unassisted, but they fail multiple times (sometimes for weeks or months) while they practice this new skill. They don’t give up and think they are a failure when they fall down the first (or fifteenth time). And we keep encouraging them.

Somehow, though, we forget how it took time, practice, and tenacity to learn how to walk, and we expect that we can do things the first time; or that we are good at it the first time. And (even unconsciously) we expect the same of others too.

What would happen if we had grace with ourselves (and others) and recognized that learning new skills takes time, patience, and practice?

Ensure that you are cultivating a learning culture around you (both for yourself and for others) where taking safe risks and practicing is encouraged.

Additionally, creating an annual growth plan helps you prioritize what you want to learn and what skills you want to acquire or hone.

Adopt a Reflection Practice

Adopting a reflection practice is tied in with continuously learning. We learn through feedback. An element of a growth mindset is seeing feedback as constructive, rather than personal criticism.

We often think about reflection in terms of major projects, but it should be part of your everyday practice. While understanding what didn’t go well, or what could have been different on a major project is important, you can incorporate that feedback loop into a daily practice.

The Roy Group’s Feedback Model incorporates three questions which can be used universally as part of a daily practice or to help reflect on a larger project.

1. What went well?

2. What was tricky?

3. What would you do differently?

Try asking others for feedback on you too but be prepared for people to either ignore your question or avoid answering. This is typical as many poor leaders have held words against people.

Asking for feedback means you need to be open to receiving what is shared. Thank the other person for sharing and never use it against them, but rather, reflect on what they’ve communicated and try to understand how it could be true for them. Often when leaders ask for feedback, they are met with silence. Resist the temptation to jump in. Give them 7-10 seconds (count slowly in your head) to respond and if they have not yet answered, ask them to think about it and then ask them when a good time to follow up with them would be. This gives them time to formulate a response but does not let them off the hook.

Kim Scott asks a great question when soliciting feedback on herself: “Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”. Sheryl Sandberg asks these questions:

• “How can I do better”

• “What am I doing that I don’t know?”

• “What am I not doing that I don’t see?”

Clarity breaks are a way to reflect too.

Cultivate Emotional Intelligence

Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, authors of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, define Emotional Intelligence (EQ) as

EQ is a critical element of understanding yourself, and others.

Recognizing your strengths, motivators, demotivators and how you react under pressure are an important part of self-awareness. You also need to understand others (and have empathy for them).

When you can recognize emotions in yourself, and others, you can adapt your communication so it is more effective.

Bradberry and  Greaves share the following statistics:

• “EQ is so critical to success that it accounts for 58 percent of performance in all types of jobs.” (Emotional Intelligence 2.0 p. 20)

• “… 90 percent of high performers are also high in EQ. On the flip side, only 20 percent of low performers are high in EQ.” (Emotional Intelligence 2.0 p. 21)

Next Steps

You’ve read this far and are all in for adopting these three practices, but where do you start? Try these tangible steps.

1. Check out my Resource Page for some of my favorite books, podcasts and other resources, including book reviews on the books I’ve read.

2. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and watch my leadership videos.

3. Create a reflection/feedback practice. Try journaling (even for a few minutes) in the morning and asking yourself the Roy Group Feedback Model questions in the evening.

4. Create a Growth Plan. Brainstorm what skills you want to improve or knowledge you want to gain. Write out all the professional development you want to do (books, podcasts, webinars, conferences, courses etc) and see which professional development opportunities will fill those gaps. Then create a reasonable plan of what you can accomplish.

5. Purchase a DISC Assessment and coaching to work on understanding yourself and improving your EQ.

6. Subscribe to my newsletter so you get great leadership advice, learn when I’ve shared new resources and blog posts, and get advance notice of offers and trainings.