Using leadership skills to develop your career

Leadership Skills to Develop a Career

Using Leadership Skills to Develop a Career

First, recognizing that the leadership skills known today will hopefully be fine-tuned, strengthened and made more valuable through experiences through my career, this paper discusses how leadership skills will be used for developing my career for the long-term. The leadership characteristics most valued including transparency and trust (Gilley, Dixon, Gilley, 153) and the ability to lead with passion and emotional intelligence (EI) are two essential aspects of any set of leadership skills (Marques, 648).

My Leadership Skills Inventory: Present and Future

The catalyst of any effective executive is the ability to foster, earn and grow trust with subordinates and associates (Drucker, 59) enabling subordinates to attain the highest levels of accomplishment based on their innate talents and strengths. This attribute of leadership also includes the ability to seek out the strengths of subordinates and when possible, peers to assist them to get to their goals. The very essence of leadership is the ability to be empathetic and clearly communicate with others and is considered to be the foundation of EI (McGuire, Rhodes, Palus, 3). As a result of the importance of EI, I think this needs to be the foundation for using leadership skills to advance my career by first focusing on this skill set and its continued growth. With a solid foundation of EI the ability to ascertain which career opportunities best fit with my unique skills sets and preferences can be defined. EI is also essential for managing subordinates in a first-time management position. Paying attention to this skill set and continually seeking to refine and grow it is going to be essential for my career to progress.

Second, working on transparency and trust is also critical to using leadership skills in my career. The ability to match up or align what I say I am going to do and what I actually do has everything to do with my credibility, in fact leaders get judged more harshly than others on the alignment of these two points. For leaders, walking the talk and fulfilling commitments is exceptionally important. As with anyone, working to bridge the gap between expectations created and fulfilled is critical for the development of any career. This is the catalyst of credibility that needs to be continually pursued to have an exceptionally strong career over time. The ability to earn and nurture trust is essential for any leader to be effective over the long-term (Hurley, 84).

Nothing of any substantial value ever gets created and maintained in an organization without passion. It is the fuel that propels projects to completion, gets goals attained and keeps teams working together towards a common goal (Marques, 649). In making the big decisions about ones' career it is therefore much more insightful to choose only those positions, whether in an individual or leader role, that one has the greatest passion for. Before embarking on professional career in any given field it is also critical to re-examine ones' one motivations and chose only those areas where there is enough passion to overcome disappointments, fatigue, loss while traversing a learning curve of a new company and its culture. In short, passion is a must-have for any leader to make any progress at all in the turbulent and economically challenging times we all live in today. I do have passion for specific areas and concentrate on them, and it is essential for my career decisions to base them on my innate strengths on the one hand and my passions on the other. I believe that at the intersection of innate abilities on the one hand and passions on the other, one can excel at their career. That is what I am looking for in terms of career progression.

In addition to all these leadership aspects, the challenge of staying patient in the midst of corporate cultures that over time have learned to be myopically focused and often slow-moving, resistant to change. The greatest long-term challenger of any leader is in initiating and sustaining long-term change in their organizational cultures (McGuire, Rhodes, Palus, 3).

Realizing that if and when I get into a managerial position within any organization, there will no doubt be times when I will want to change the culture and see opportunities for it to become more efficient, more streamlined and market-focused. I'll have to develop my patience as a leader specifically for these circumstances and concentrate on finding incremental approaches to bringing lasting, positive change into the organizations I will become a member of during my career. Resistance to change has forced many a manager to become frustrated, lose focus and abandon their objectives (Drucker, 59). This has direct implications for managing ones' career throughout the times when being impatient and even impulsive could lead to incorrect or even faulty decision making. Of all leadership attributes this is the one I need the most assistance with developing more effectively. Learning how to first size up a culture and then determine what I can or cannot change is going to be critical, and developing the patience during this process is going to be very important.

While I have yet to manage anyone, I would like to also pursue the skills necessary to excel at transformational leadership (Marques, 650). This is a unique skill set that seeks out the innate strengths and talents of others and works to maximize them. Transformational leadership is a skill set I aspire to in my career as it would give me the ability to serve others and strengthen them, and in so doing, create strong teams. From the stronger teams, more can be accomplished, and greater collaboration happens. As with other leadership skill sets, this one appears to be highly valuable both as a working professional and leader in any field or organization.