Leadership skills are needed at every stage of an individual’s career. These skills often permeate several aspects of an individual’s life, be it with regard to family, education, or employment. It is important that one pays the utmost attention to one’s leadership proficiency while climbing the ladder of success in life.
From a technical point of view, leadership skills can be defined as the ability to use one’s knowledge and competencies to accomplish a set of larger goals. From this definition, it stands to reason that to be able to lead a team in achieving success in any venture, the leader should also possess some considerable skills that can be leveraged to accomplish the work. Without these intrinsic skills and competencies, one cannot hold themselves out as a leader worth their salt.
Three major types of skill sets may be required by a leader in their quest to efficiently lead a team, organization, or any group of people. They are conceptual skills, human skills, and technical skills. Let’s take a closer look at how all these skill sets play out in the life of any leader.
CONCEPTUAL SKILLS
These skill sets are most commonly seen in entrepreneurs and business owners and involve the ability to work with ideas and concepts in creating value. It’s also synonymous with the work done by inventors and innovators, who constantly have to rack their brains and conduct endless modelings and simulations in creating value in an ecosystem.
The conceptual leader is never satisfied with the status quo, as they constantly brainstorm ways of enhancing existing systems or creating new ones if the old systems cannot be salvaged. This type of leader often dabbles in research and development, ostensibly to unravel some mysteries surrounding a particular phenomenon related to their goals. Once they come out with some innovative ideas, they cascade them for implementation to their team members while they sit atop the organization to ascertain its efficacy.
Feedback is one particular tool that helps conceptual leaders in their daily routine. Therefore, they need to set systems in place that provide them adequate feedback on all the newly introduced ideas and concepts that they can then use to guide them in similar future endeavors. This is one skill set that truly should permeate all human endeavors, because it goes to the very heart of human existence. For one to be successful in any endeavor, they must have the ability to solve problems, which require a high degree of conceptual skills to achieve. Conceptual leadership skills have largely accounted for the success of many great leaders in fields such as politics, media, banking, and manufacturing.
HUMAN SKILLS
Human skills, as the name indicates, involves having the skills and ability to work with people to create shared value for an entire team. It’s not enough to have conceptual skills and deploy them effectively; one certainly needs people through which to deploy all these strategies, hence the need for human skills.
In most institutions, it’s the human resource department that handles this aspect of the organizational leadership, but for a leader worth their salt, competence relative to human capital is just as crucial as conceptual skills. A good leader should therefore possess good human relations skills in order to endear him to his workers at all times, resulting in them giving their best at work. Systems and structures can also be put in place to cater to the welfare and needs of staff members even in the absence of the leader. One practical way of achieving these skills is setting up departments like the human resource department, which would principally be devoted towards employee welfare and general well-being.
Performance incentive schemes can also be introduced to enhance the human skills of leaders in an organization. For instance, if the annual best worker is presented with a plaque by the CEO or any top management member, it serves as a source of motivation for workers to do more and be recognized. Leadership should never create a yawning gap between themselves and their workers; this essentially deprives them of critical feedback needed to improve upon their conceptual skills. They should rather operate using an open-door policy where workers can easily approach leadership with their ideas on specific developments in the company. Any leader that creates an opaque setting around himself in an organization certainly lives on an island and is bound to fail, regardless of how clever and smart their conceptual skills may be. The rule of the thumb in our leadership drive is simple: People matter, so let’s prioritize them in our leadership skills approach. You may be the brainchild of that wonderful idea, but note that you can’t carry it out alone; you need a team around you to bring it to fruition.
TECHNICAL SKILLS
Technical skills are the knowledge and proficiency about a particular discipline in an organization. Leaders in an organization may not necessarily do the legwork that brings the results, but being in a leadership position does require that one also possesses considerable knowledge about the technicalities of a particular job. For instance, one does not necessarily need to be an engineer to head an engineering firm, but it is expected that leaders familiarize themselves with the basic tenets of engineering work in order to be able to effectively supervise and appreciate what the subordinates do on a daily basis.
Lack of technical skills in leadership may affect the synergy that exists between leadership and the workforce, which may be borne out of the fact that management may not always understand what subordinates do and vice versa. This can also serve as fertile ground for certain malpractices and ethical misconduct on the part of employees due to the technical knowledge gap between them and their leaders. Some identified ways of improving upon the technical skills of leaders include taking refresher courses, completing simulation exercises, and participating in in-house training.
In summary, leadership skills play a pivotal role in the life of any leader. Regarding the three main skill sets, it’s important to note that each one of them is important, but a leader’s outlook on an organization determines the skill sets they will need to deploy and when. Generally, it is believed that for most leaders who double as entrepreneurs or business owners, conceptual skills are needed more often than human and technical skills, while leadership figures at the management level may need an optimum level of proficiency in all three skills to be able to function optimally.
Author:
Phidelia Johnson is a global Human Resources Practitioner with eighteen years of leadership success. With a focus on streamlining Human Resources administration, she’s well-equipped to find the right solution to a myriad of concerns. Her experience as a commercial business leader gives her a unique ability to advocate for both the employer and the employee.
In her down time, Phidelia is a master of her kitchen, creating wonderful dishes filled with passion and flavor. If she’s not cooking delicious food, she’s stretched out with a good book. She hopes to use her experience to help others, guide company leaders to best practices, and help build better professionals and stronger organizations.