The Foundation of Effective Leadership
- 15 hours ago
- 2 min read
I speak with experienced leaders on the regular. On paper, they have it all figured out. Behind closed doors, you hear the truth about the difficulty of holding everything all at once.
These highly capable leaders also realize they have things they have to work on to reduce their stress and fatigue that comes with being responsible for other people and their work product.
It’s no surprise that it’s the people part of the job that creates the most amount of tension. We live in a world where hard skills and execution have been prioritized over everything for a very long time. The short-term focus on quarterly results means training budgets for people skills and the long game of leadership and employee engagement are under funded.
This is still surprising given that, Gallup research shows that 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager. It’s not the company strategy, the product, or the compensation. The single greatest variable in whether a team thrives is the quality of human leadership they experience daily.
To close this gap, we have to recognize that human skills are the foundation of people skills. Human skills are your ability to deeply understand yourself, your thought habits, and your behavior patterns. You cannot fix an external relationship until you understand your own internal operating system.
How to step into your true power and close the gap:
Define Your Goal: Ask yourself what you actually want your relationships at work to look like. We often get so stuck in the current tension that we forget to imagine what could be different.
Tame the Critic: When you feel insecure or defensive, that is just your Inner Critic taking over. low down, look at the situation from many angles, and respond from a grounded place, rather than react from a place of insecurity.
Put it on the Agenda: If you truly want to improve your leadership effectiveness, you have to put people skills on your daily to-do list. One way to action this is to start and end your day by asking yourself specific questions about your interactions, your worries, and your people priorities.
If you want to be a respected and effective leader, people must be your first priority. That means doing the deep excavation to understand yourself and what you are bringing to conversations and interactions.
