WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY
Developing Your Leadership Skills
Leadership Skills
Great leaders can come from anywhere, they can help transform individuals, teams, and entire organizations. Leadership is not limited to those holding a particular title or position. Strong leadership skills are important to anyone who wants to have an impact in their job or community, drive innovation, and effectively lead others. This page delves into the importance of leadership skills and explores practical strategies to enhance your leadership capabilities.
What Are Leadership Skills?
Leadership skills include motivating team members and fostering unity. Having strong leadership skills refers to one's ability and strength to supervise, champion change, and take initiative.
Leadership skills also include the ability to guide others through complex situations such as conflict resolution, negotiation, communication, and decision-making.
Why Are Leadership Skills Important?
Leadership skills help you create a clear vision for your team and lay out the required resources and steps to achieve it. Here are some examples:
- Effective team performance. You can guide and motivate teams, leading to improved collaboration, engagement, and productivity.
- Organizational success. Strong leadership skills contribute to strategic decision-making, goal attainment, and driving the organization toward success.
- Employee development. Leadership skills enable you to mentor and develop team members, fostering their growth, satisfaction, and retention.
What Are the Benefits of Having Leadership Skills?
Leadership skills help to provide others with vision, direction, and inspiration and to motivate them to achieve goals—especially in the workplace. Here are the benefits of good leadership skills in any organization:
- Facilitating healthy communication: Leaders oversee and exemplify proper communication within an organization, fostering an environment where open dialogue and information sharing thrive. They create an environment where everyone feels safe sharing their thoughts, leading to better collaboration among team members.
- Improving productivity: Great leaders have the ability to influence a team's productivity by providing guidance, motivation and support. Through effective leadership, individuals are inspired to work towards and achieve their goals within set timelines, which in turn enhances team performance and outcomes.
- Promoting efficiency: Leaders give directions and guidance, and they delegate tasks according to each team member’s abilities. By aligning an organization towards a common goal, leaders can get the most out of their teams when everyone is focused on a common goal.
- Minimizing mistakes: Good leadership skills ensure that processes run smoothly while minimizing errors. This is more important in highly work-intensive environments where a single mistake can cause severe consequences. A leader should identify possible problems and solve them in time.
- Enhancing team performance: Leaders should have a deep understanding of their team members' strengths and actively work towards maximizing those strengths and motivating team members. By fostering a positive work environment that’s supportive and promotes growth, leaders demonstrate their appreciation and value for their employees. This creates engagement and motivation for the team, leading to higher levels of productivity and the chance to exceed goals.
- Promoting organizational success: Leadership skills equip individuals with the ability to understand and articulate a vision, which allows them to propel their organization toward a better future. By having a clear vision, a leader knows their organization's position and sets goals to guide its trajectory. The vision serves as a guide to decision-making and inspires the team to work towards that desired outcome.
Examples of Leadership Skills
Leadership skills include delegation, motivating and inspiring others, conflict resolution, conducting successful meetings, developing a good working culture, and decision-making. Here are explanations of a few of these:
- Visionary leadership: This means having a clear and inspiring vision for the future of the organization. It includes the ability to articulate that vision, motivate and inspire your team to work towards it.
- Delegation: A leader must be able to assign tasks to team members based on their skills and capabilities. This includes providing clear instructions, support, and guidance to help them complete the tasks successfully.
- Strategic thinking: Strategic thinking is the ability to mentally evaluate complex situations, assess risks and opportunities, and make decisions that align with the organization’s goals.
- Team building: Successful leaders create a cohesive and high-performing team. They foster trust and open communication among team members and leverage individual strengths for the success of the team.
- Conflict resolution: Leaders must address and manage conflicts or disagreements within a team or organization. They must be able to facilitate discussions and find common ground.
- Time management: Leaders should set goals, plan activities, and eliminate distractions effectively to make good use of time. This helps maximize productivity and achieve organizational goals on schedule.
How Can I Use Leadership Skills?
Leadership skills are applicable across various industries in the following ways:
Team Leading
As a skilled leader, you have the power to foster a positive team culture that encourages collaboration and taps into individual strengths. By promoting teamwork and creating an environment where everyone can contribute their best, you enhance productivity and strengthen the bonds within your team.
Project Management
With strong leadership skills, you become the driving force behind successful project execution. You set clear objectives, meticulously plan activities, delegate tasks, and allocate resources to ensure smooth progress. By skillfully managing projects, you steer your team towards achieving goals and delivering results.
Influence Stakeholders
Effective leaders possess exceptional communication skills, enabling them to engage and persuade stakeholders. Through clear and compelling communication, you can gain stakeholders' attention and support for your initiatives. By building meaningful relationships and influencing stakeholders, you advance the interests of your team and organization.
Champion Change
Leaders play a pivotal role in spearheading change within your organization. Leadership skills empower you to recognize the need for change, tackle resistance and successfully implement transformative initiatives while inspiring and guiding others. Positive change ensures your organization remains adaptable in an ever-evolving business landscape.
How Can I Learn Leadership Skills?
An aspiring leader must plan and commit to personal growth and continuous learning. You can learn leadership skills by enrolling in any WGU program. WGU offers degree programs in business, IT, healthcare, and education. We offer various leadership courses as part of the curriculum. These courses cover leadership theories, effective communication, team management, and ethical leadership.
School of Education
In education degree programs, you will learn to:
- Reflect on authentic leadership characteristics.
- Agree on a set of expectations and duties for the leader and for team members.
Leavitt School of Health
In IT degree programs the leadership skills taught will equip you to:
- Transform the healthcare system at local, regional, and national levels.
- Inspire collaboration in pursuit of the highest quality patient care.
School of Business
In the business degree programs, you will learn to:
- Manage operational processes at a company.
- Make informed decisions to determine the best use of resources for a firm.
- Lead employee work groups about improving employee ability to successfully achieve goals.
- Promote the organization's vision, values, and core beliefs.
- Empower team members to make decisions that impact an organization.
- Assess the functioning of an existing team to identify common dynamics or sources of dysfunction.
- Articulate the shared vision and goals of a given initiative to a team.
- Articulate the characteristics and components needed to be an effective leader.
School of Technology
In IT degree programs the leadership skills taught will equip you to:
- Exhibit behaviors and attributes that the leader wants the team members to emulate.
- Establish group norms of performance and mutual accountability within a provided strategy.
- Develop goals with organizational team leads.
- Define an organizational culture by establishing a code of ethics, policies, and standards.
- Cultivate an environment of inclusion and collaboration that values the input of all team members.
- Create open lines of communication between the leader and the team members.
In these programs, you’ll get guidance from your supervisors on how to exercise these skills professionally.
Frequently Asked Questions
Influential leaders help to maximize efficiency and play an important role in organization management. They help achieve goals, enhance efficiency, motivate others, build morale, initiate action, give directions, and improve the work environment.
Leadership skills can be learned, although some people may be more prone to exhibiting them. With a little effort and determination, you can gain these skills yourself.
Democratic leadership is the most effective leadership style. It embraces everyone’s participation in every process, sharing their thoughts with the assurance that they count.
In this approach, teammates are eager to participate in decision-making since they are sure their feedback counts. However, there are different leadership styles, and their impact on organizational culture also varies.
Recognize and appreciate their achievements, set achievable and meaningful goals, offer mentorship programs and support, promote good work culture, and encourage a sense of ownership and purpose among your team. This way, they will feel motivated and inspired to achieve goals and realize your organization’s visions.
