Leadership Skills and Qualities

What leadership skills make a great leader - and can they be learned?

Henry Kissinger defined the art of leadership as the art of ‘taking people where they would not have gone by themselves’.

This highlights the basics of leadership: to be a leader, you need followers and secondly, you need to be taking them somewhere.

Without followers, you are not leading. If you are not going somewhere new, you are a steward managing the status quo rather than a leader.

Think back and remember good, even great leaders that you have known. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you remember them?

Is it easiest to recall their personality, charisma, the way they projected themselves and made you feel? Their qualities?

What about their leadership skills?

Are these as easy to pin down in your mind?

When we focus on the personality and charisma of our leaders, we narrow the art of leadership to being specific to them as individuals.  It seems that some people just seem to ‘have what it takes’ - and by definition, others just don’t. Leadership seems elusive and for those lucky few who’ve won the lottery of the ‘right qualities’.

However, when we focus on leadership skills, we can shift our attention to the aspect of leadership that can be learned.

If leadership is a skill, or requires the mastery of a number of skills, then the good news is that we can all be leaders.  No matter what skill level we start out with, we can work to become more proficient in each skill and continue to grow and become better and better leaders.

Importantly, we can use these skills to lead from anywhere from within our organisation or our community, we don’t have to be at the top to influence those around us and take them somewhere new.

Our leadership skills are also not pre-determined by our education.  In all spheres of leadership, many of our best known and most influential leaders have no degree or formal qualifications, let alone an MBA from an elite business school. 

So what are these leadership skills that will bring people on a journey with us?  

And what qualities will help us be a leader that others will even want to follow?

Remember, there is no consensus or single view on what makes a great leader.

This list of leadership skills and qualities contains no reference to personality, charisma, heroism or being ‘an inspiration’.

Instead, these leadership skills are practical and we use them everyday.  They are the skills that you’d expect any person to develop no matter where they operate in the organisation, not just those labelled as ‘leaders’ on the organisation chart.  

Similarly, these leadership qualities are qualities that we’d hope we’d bring with us into work everyday and would want our colleagues to do the same.  Of course, it isn’t always so easy, but imagine how much more productive our working days would be if we all did!

But as a leader sets the standard for his or her area of responsibility, the values and behaviours they role model will greatly impact trust, working relationships, productivity and the working environment around them.

There is no perfect leader, and no perfect leadership approach.  As leaders, we need to focus on how to be an effective leader in each situation.  Developing these leadership skills and role modelling these qualities will improve our chances of getting this right.

Leadership Competency Frameworks

Many organisations are moving beyond loose, ad hoc or individual definitions of 'leadership skills' towards defining exactly what leadership competencies they want their leaders to demonstrate using Leadership Competency Frameworks.

Competencies are more than just skills.  Competencies include attitudes and behaviours as well as skills.  They define the outcomes that should be observed, and the way that those outcomes should be delivered.

Leadership Competency Frameworks define and communicate to everyone in an organisation the competencies that the organisation views as critical to its success and achieving its goals. 

Examples of leadership competencies within a Leadership Competency Framework could include: ‘thinking and acting strategically’, ‘demonstrates a passion for customers’, ‘delivering our vision’.

By specifically defining for each leadership competency the (a) required outcome and (b) way that the outcome is delivered, the organisation communicates to everyone the leadership skills, attitudes, behaviours and outcomes that it expects its leaders to demonstrate. 

The organisation then has an objective, consistent and tangible means of assessing:

• Potential competence in a particular role as part of the recruitment process
• Whether people are demonstrating competence in their current role
• Development and training needs in order to be able to demonstrate competence in the current or a higher role

This gives everyone a level playing field for measuring their competence, assessing their development needs and suitability for promotion and improving their performance.

Leadership Competency Frameworks therefore aim to replace subjectivity and individual approaches to assessing leadership skills and performance with a consistent approach that is applied in the same way to everyone.