Leadership Skills

The bottom line is that many of the best leadership skills center on how to create a high achieving environment over merely getting work done. Leadership skills have more to do with setting an organizational culture and foundation of processes in place to allow employees to get their work done quickly and to the best of their ability. Leadership skills then have much more to do with enabling change in organization than in merely keeping the status quo running through control. Leaders transform organizations through their set of behaviors while managers maintain the status quo.

Effective leadership skills include the ability to communicate clearly and equitably throughout an organization, the ability to define a vision of the future and develop strategies that give their companies the ability to attain that vision, the ability to create supportive and positive environment for employees to excel in. Most important however is the ability of leaders to infuse passion and commitment into an organization. In fact the world's best leaders are also some of the most passionate people in any organization. They are the reason that many organizations advance even in the toughest of times because they bring out the best in people around them, including peers and subordinates, through a passion for bringing change about for the better. Excellent management combines all these attributes and a great sense of when to use which managerial strategy in which situation at the best possible time, and in that innate sense is what excellence in management is all about. Finally excellent leaders strive to be transparent and trustworthy to both peers and employees in their organizations. Jenkins and Oliver (1998) define this aspect of behavior that leads to successful change as being critical for the creation of trust between executive managers and the many affected employees of the company. Transparency creates trust.

References

Jenkins and Oliver (1998) - the Eagle & the Monk: Seven Principles of Successful Change (United Publishers Group, 1998)