Leaders like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates have a vision that their employees (and eventually the world) have come to share. This shared vision helps a good company become great. It also helps pull a bad company out of the depths.
If you want to be that kind of leader you need to be willing to develop yourself and your skills. It requires work and commitment, but it can be done. Here are four ways you can develop your leadership skills to become the leader you were born to be.
1. Learn How to Make Good Choices
Being a great leader is all about making wise choices. However, many of us have never learned what good decision-making actually looks like. We don’t have role models. However, this doesn’t have to be our undoing. History provides us with plenty of good role models.
Through books, movies, and interviews we can learn a great deal about the choices they made. Many great leaders made similar mistakes. Study those. Learn from them. Your company will benefit from this.
As Dallin Larsen, CEO of Vasayo, said on his Crunchbase profile, “A life of significance is a byproduct of making the ‘best’ choices”. Over the course of time, you’ll learn to make better choices, which in turn will make you a better leader.
2. Exercise Humbleness
An article on the Entrepreneur website says that if you want to be a good leader, learn to be humble. If you make a mistake own it. If your team creates a successful project give credit where credit is due.
Often leaders make the mistake of assuming that leadership means that their employees are their servants. However, the best leaders throughout history have often demonstrated the opposite. They served the people who worked for them and achieved greater success because of it.
3. Get to Know Your Employees
Sometimes, employees can start to feel like nameless, faceless numbers. Management can exacerbate this by emphasizing making number over employee well-being. While it is important to understand the messages that your company’s numbers are telling you, never forget that there are real people behind the number. They have families, worries, hopes, and dreams, and all of these things exist outside the workplace. However, all of these factors influence the employees they become.
If you want to make sure that they thrive in your company get to know them. Learn about what’s important to them. What motivates them? What gives them angst. Taking the time to find these things out helps you build loyalty. It also helps you get the most out of your employees.
4. Learn to Communicate Effectively
Everyone processes information differently, and many of the conflicts that arise in the workplace arise out of these differences. A great leader communicates in a way that helps employees understand their jobs. These leaders clearly communicate expectations for their employees’ performances. If they have to reprimand an employee, they do so in private.
To implement this have written policies for behavior. Acknowledge a job well-done. Meet conflict head on and with tact. This helps to make your company’s operations run more smoothly. You’ll become a better leader in the process because your vision for your company will be effectively communicated. People can’t carry out your plans if you don’t communicate them properly.
No leaders are born. They are made through observation, hard work, and ingenuity. If you want to become a great leader know that it often requires a commitment to growth that lasts a lifetime.