Leadership Skills for Business Owners, MDs and Directors

**Leadership requires a range of skills. Here are 7 of the important ones**: ### 1.Relationship Building A handful of leaders will say they that they do not need to be loved in the workplace to succeed. While demanding people do their job and hit their targets is a key part of the role, this is not enough for a leader to be truly great. Great leaders build cohesive and engaged teams. They have the leadership skills to forge strong working relationships with their employees. Leaders with strong, trusting, and authentic relationships with their teams know that investing time in building these bonds makes them more effective as a leader and creates a foundation for success. Good working relationships increase employee engagement. According to a recent Gallup poll, higher employee engagements leads to a 21% increase in productivity and 37% less absenteeism So even if you think you don’t need to be loved in the workplace, you must be skilled in building good relationships to be an effective leader. If your team is highly engaged and happy in the workplace, you are likely to be well respected as a leader with employees who love what they do, and hopefully the strong relationships you cultivate will help your team perform at their highest level. ### 2.Employee Motivation In close connection with relationship building, the ability to motivate your workforce is as important as keeping employee engagement high. One of the most effective leadership skills is knowing how to continuously motivate employees. This requires you to be connected to your teams and attentive to what is going on around them. In a recent survey of 10,000 employees, the number 1 complaint (63%) from employees concerning their managers is lack of appreciation. Conversely, when managers appreciate their contribution, their engagement increases by 60%. It was found that boosting morale is the top (32%) motivational technique employees prefer. If employees are not motivated, the company can be negatively affected with absenteeism, attrition and low productivity. Motivated employees are much more engaged, they are also more self-confident in what they do, and can do. This leads them to know how to react in difficult situations and develop innovative ideas that could help optimize business performance.   ### 3.Adaptability Adaptability is one of the most important leadership skills. Leaders need to contend with a hyper-competitive business environment, climate change, the changes brought about by COVID-19 pandemic (like working from home), the rising cost of energy and interest rates and many more factors. These all require leaders to be agile and adapt to new norms. Effective leaders must be able to adapt to both internal, and external changes – even if that means working outside of your comfort zone. As a leader you need to develop a lifelong learning mentality to ensure that you are not left behind by shifts in your industry and can give your business the competitive edge. You need to be agile and adaptable which is easier said than done. One way to develop leadership agility and adaptability is to be accountable and make sure that you have laid out a plan on how you should respond to change. This plan should contain an achievable timeline, allowing you to constantly check your progress on how well you are adapting to the change and how you are exemplifying this to your team. ### 4.Innovation Innovation in leadership is important for every business. Successful innovation begins with ideation — the phase where outstanding ideas are developed and become the foundation of innovation success. Consider some of the industry leaders, what did it take for Apple to become a leader technology industry? They innovated products for their ideal customers. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook led the innovation and creativity for Apple by continuously forging ahead of the competition. This probably made them some of the most innovative leaders within the tech industry. The increasing demand for creativity and innovation will continue to be a driving force for executives who must harness their leadership skills in these areas to be effective and competitive. ### 5.Decision-making A leader is tasked with making decisions all the time. To be an effective leader, your decision-making skills need to be top notch. Critical decisions affecting your organisation on a large scale need to be sound, rational and solid. Your decisions as a leader will determine your – and potentially your organisation’s – success. Making decisions is a fundamental part of leadership. As a leader you need to develop strong decision-making skills and have the conviction to stand by your decisions, whilst also recognising the need to adapt when those decisions do not lead to the desired outcome. There is a balancing act between moving ahead decisively and changing course as needed. Remember, some decisions may not always be popular. Making an unpopular but necessary decision is probably one of the most difficult tasks as a leader. For example, you may not want to make redundancies but have to do so to ensure the future of the business. This won’t be popular with your team but the decision needs to be taken. ### 6.Conflict Management Conflict can happen in any area of business and needs to be managed. A conflict in business is any issue between two or more individuals that can potentially disrupt work. This conflict may go beyond the workplace as it can involve customers, suppliers and even competitors. When a conflict arises, an effective leader should be able to jump in and resolve or at least mitigate the conflict before it affects the business negatively. When properly dealt with, a conflict may even turn out to be positive for your organisation, as it can often lead to stronger bonds or new ideas. To be effective as a leader, you must be good at identifying conflict, and have foresight on how to resolve it. It is also essential to be rational when faced with confrontation. Conflict management is no doubt one of the most important leadership competencies and it demands some study and training. As a leader, it is important that you are able to manage conflict, but developing these same skills in your team can help avoid conflict altogether. ### 7.Critical Thinking Leading a business is unquestionably challenging. To be successful, a leader must make a lot of difficult decisions, often under pressure. Research shows that critical thinking is the most important skill required of leaders to successfully lead an organisation. Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly, whilst building a logical connection between different ideas. Critical thinkers are often intelligent decision makers, highly analytical and generally always rational. Critical thinking is a learned skill and it is worth studying this area and adopting **Critical thinkers:** * Seek the truth- they ask questions and follow the evidence * Make judgements amid uncertainty * Strive to be well-informed on a range of topics * Trust their own reasoning skills to make sound decisions * Organise areas and invest time in problem solving * Identify consequences of decisions * Maintain an open mind There are many skills a great leader must have or develop. If you would like some support with developing your leadership skills, then please [**get in touch**](https://www.nayloraccountancy.com/contact).