These are the timeless, fundamental skills that are needed by leaders throughout every organization — and they’re important regardless of role, industry, or location.

But the way you address each core leadership skill, and what you need to learn or emphasize around it, will shift and change as you move into higher levels in the organizational hierarchy and encounter new leadership challenges.

So what exactly are these foundational leadership skills? While there may not be a single definitive list of core leadership skills, at CCL, we call the core leadership skills needed in every role and career “The Fundamental 4.”

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The Fundamental Leadership Skills Needed in Every Career

The “Fundamental 4” Leadership Skills

At CCL, we see the 4 core leadership skills as:

1. Self-Awareness
2. Communication
3. Influence
4. Learning Agility

1. Self-Awareness.

Simply put, knowing and leading yourself is key to becoming as effective as possible at leading others. But gaining greater self-awareness is anything but simple. It takes intentional effort to assess your natural abilities and development opportunities; determine how to maximize your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses; and recognize your own values, biases, and perspectives.

Taking the time to reflect on these things and consider how you’ve been shaped by your background and social identity builds greater self-awareness. And ultimately, greater awareness about yourself as a person will make you a better leader. If you’re not sure where to start, here are 4 sure-fire ways to boost your self-awareness.

2. Communication.

Communication is one of the most basic, across-the-board leadership skills that all of us need to develop and refine during our careers. “Communicating information and ideas” is consistently rated among the most important leadership competencies for leaders to be successful. Communication is also embedded in a number of other core leadership skills, including “leading employees,” “participative management,” and “building and mending relationships.”

Writing clearly, speaking with clarity, and active listening skills are all part of the core leader competencies related to effective communication. And as you move up the career ladder, communication in leadership roles expands to behaviors such as encouraging discussion, building trust, conveying vision and strategic intent, and pulling people along with you. At every leader level, communication is a critically important skill.

3. Influence.

Developing your influencing and leadership skills helps you to communicate your vision and goals, align the efforts of others, and build commitment from people at all levels.  

Influence can vary greatly at different levels in the organization. Knowing your stakeholders, or audience, is key. Do you need to influence your boss? Your peers? Direct reports? Customers? Each stakeholder has special concerns and issues, so consider the most appropriate ways of influencing others for your particular situation.

Early in your career, or in individual contributor roles, influence is about working effectively with people over whom you have no authority. It requires being able to present logical and compelling arguments and engaging in give-and-take. Later on, or in more senior-level or executive roles, influential leadership skills are focused more on steering long-range objectives, inspiration, and motivation. But throughout your career, influence remains a core leadership skill. Ultimately, influence allows you to get to the business of getting things done and achieving desirable outcomes.

4. Learning Agility.

To develop as leaders and as people, we need to be active, agile learners. Leaders need to be in a mode of constant learning, valuing and seeking out experiences to fuel leadership development, and recognizing when new behaviors, leadership skills, or attitudes are required — and accepting responsibility for developing those.

Learning agility is critical for career longevity, and it involves learning from mistakes, asking insightful questions, and being open to feedback. It also includes learning new skills quickly, being open to learning from hardships and taking advantage of opportunities to learn from heat experiences, and responding well to new situations.

For senior leaders, learning agility is also about inspiring learning in others and creating a learning culture throughout the organization.

Set your development as a leader on the right track by learning and practicing core leader competencies and the 4 foundational leadership skills of self-awareness, communication, influence, and learning agility.

How to Grow the Core Leadership Skills

Developing Foundational Leadership Skills to Prepare for Every Role

If you’re thinking about adding the Fundamental 4 to your leadership skills list, keep in mind that each skill should be continuously improved, or “built on as you go.” To be effective, you must continue to develop, adapt, and strengthen these core leadership skills throughout your career — because the learning never ends. As you gain leadership skills in one area, you’ll find there’s even more to learn and practice in taking on new challenges and larger roles.

And if you think you’ve “skipped over” any of the Fundamental 4 core leadership skills during your career, you won’t be as effective, or fully develop your leadership potential. The good news is that, with concerted effort, you can still develop any skills you missed out on; it’s never too late for soft skill development!

If you can identify any leadership gaps or weaknesses in your leadership journey, you have the potential to learn, grow, and change. With the foundational leadership competencies of self-awareness, communication, influence, and learning agility as the core of your leadership skills development, you can be confident that you’re building capacity for new opportunities and the next level of responsibility — because these 4 are core leadership skills needed for everyone, and every career stage.

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Partner with us to help your organization develop the4  fundamental leadership skills. Our leadership fundamentals course: Lead 4 Success®, helps grow core leader competencies for foundational leadership skills development.

The post The Core Leadership Skills You Need in Every Role appeared first on CCL.

We need good leaders to help guide us and make the essential decisions, big and small, that keep things moving forward.

Our society is usually quick to identify a bad leader, but how can you identify a good one? What would most people say are the qualities of a good leader?

What Good Leadership Looks Like

Based upon our decades of research and experience working with leaders at thousands of organizations around the world, we’ve found that the best leaders consistently possess certain fundamental qualities and skills. Here are 12 essential leadership traits.

1. Self-Awareness
2. Respect
3. Compassion
4. Vision
5. Communication
6. Learning Agility
7. Collaboration
8. Influence
9. Integrity
10. Courage
11. Gratitude
12. Resilience

1. Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the understanding of yourself, including personality traits, behaviors, anxieties, and emotions. While this is a more inwardly focused trait, self-awareness and humility are paramount qualities of leadership. The better you understand yourself and recognize your own strengths and weaknesses, the more effective you can be as a leader. Do you know how other people view you, and do you understand how you show up at work and at home? Take the time to learn about the 4 aspects of self-awareness and how to strengthen each component.

2. Respect

Respect, when demonstrated consistently, is one of the most important things a leader can do. It helps ease tensions and conflict, fosters trust, and improves your effectiveness. Creating a culture of respect is about more than just the absence of disrespect. Respectfulness can be shown in many different ways, but it often starts with showing you truly value others’ perspectives and making an effort to build belonging in the workplace — both critical components of healthy workplace cultures.

3. Compassion

Compassion is more than simply showing empathy or even listening and seeking to understand. Compassion requires leaders to act on what they learn. After someone shares a concern or speaks up about something, they won’t feel truly heard if their leader doesn’t then take some type of meaningful action on the information, our researchers have found. This is the core of compassionate leadership, and it helps to build trust, increase collaboration, and decrease turnover across organizations.

4. Vision

Vision is your aspiration for the future. Motivating others and garnering commitment toward that vision are essential parts of leadership. Purpose-driven leaders ensure they connect their team’s daily tasks and the values of individual team members to the overall direction of the organization. This can help employees find meaning in their work — which increases engagement, inspires trust, and drives priorities forward. You’ll want to communicate the vision in ways that help others understand it, remember it, and go on to share it themselves.

5. Communication

Communication shows up in many ways, from transmitting information and storytelling to soliciting input and using active listening techniques. Effective leadership and effective communication are intertwined. The best leaders are skilled communicators who can communicate in a variety of ways, both orally and in writing, and with a wide range of people from different backgrounds, roles, levels, geographies, and more. The quality and effectiveness of communication among leaders at your organization will directly affect the success of your business strategy, too.

6. Learning Agility

Learning agility is the ability to know what to do when you don’t know what to do. If you’re a “quick study” or are able to excel in unfamiliar circumstances, you might already be learning agile. But anybody can foster and increase learning agility through intentional practice and effort. After all, great leaders are really great learners.

7. Collaboration

Collaboration is a characteristic shown when leaders work effectively with a variety of colleagues of different social identities, locations, roles, and experiences. As the world has become more complex and interconnected, good leaders find themselves spanning boundaries and learning to work across various types of divides and organizational silos. When leaders value and embrace collaboration, whether within their teams or cross-functionally, several benefits arise — including increased innovation, higher-performing teams, and a more engaged and empowered workforce.

8. Influence

Influence, or being able to persuade people through thoughtful use of appropriate influencing tactics, is an important trait of inspiring, effective leaders. For some people, “influence” may sound unseemly. But as a leader, you must be able to influence others to get the work done — you cannot do it all alone. Influence is quite different from manipulation, and it needs to be done authentically and transparently. It requires high levels of emotional intelligence and trust.

9. Integrity

Integrity is being consistent, honest, moral, and trustworthy, and it’s an essential leadership trait for the individual and the organization. It’s especially important for top-level executives who are charting the organization’s course and making countless other significant decisions. Our research has found that leader integrity is a potential blind spot for organizations, so make sure you reinforce the importance of honesty and integrity to managers at all levels.

10. Courage

Courage enables both team members and leaders to take bold actions that move things in the right direction. It can be hard to speak up at work, whether you want to voice a new idea, provide feedback to a direct report, or flag a concern for someone above you. That’s part of the reason courage is a key leadership trait — it takes courage to do what’s right! Leaders who promote high levels of psychological safety in the workplace enable their teams to speak up freely and share candid concerns without fear of repercussions. This fosters a coaching culture that supports courage and truth-telling.

11. Gratitude

Gratitude is the uplifting emotion experienced after receiving something of value. Being thankful can lead to higher self-esteem, reduced depression and anxiety, and better sleep. Sincere gratitude can even make you a better leader. Yet few people regularly say “thank you” in work settings, even though most people say they’d be willing to work harder for an appreciative boss. The best leaders know how to show frequent gratitude in the workplace.

12. Resilience

Resilience is more than the ability to bounce back from obstacles and setbacks — it’s the ability to respond adaptively to challenges. Practicing resilient leadership means you’ll project a positive outlook that will help others maintain the emotional strength they need to commit to a shared vision, and the courage to move forward and overcome setbacks. A good leader focuses on resilience, both taking care of themselves and also prioritizing leading employee wellbeing, too — thereby enabling better performance for themselves and their teams.

3 Core Truths About Characteristics of Good Leadership

At the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)®, we’ve been researching the traits of a good leader and the role of leadership for nearly 6 decades. Here are 3 of our core tenets about good leaders and effective leadership.

Good leaders are made, not born.

First, we believe that leaders are made, not born. Put another way, leadership is a skill that can be developed. Good leaders are molded through experience, continued study, intentional effort, and adaptation. So you can strengthen any of these 12 characteristics of a good leader, if you’re open to growth, use your experiences to fuel development, and put in the time and effort toward self-improvement.

Similarly, organizations can help their people hone these top leadership qualities by providing ample opportunities for training, offering support for learning from challenges, and providing access to coaching and mentoring programs.

Leadership is a social process.

It’s also essential to recognize that leadership is less about one strong or charismatic individual, and more about a group of people working collectively to achieve results together. If you demonstrate several of the characteristics of a good leader, but fail to grasp this key point, chances are you won’t get very far on your own. You may be well-liked and respected, but it will be challenging to accomplish team or organizational goals. At CCL, we like to say that the outcomes of leadership are about creating direction, alignment, and commitment, or DAC, within a group.

Good leadership never stops.

Also, we believe that leadership isn’t a destination, it’s a journey — it’s something that you’ll have to work at regularly throughout your career, regardless of what level you reach in your organization or what industry you work in. Different teams, projects, and situations will provide different challenges and require different leadership qualities and competencies to succeed. So you will need to be able to continue to apply these leadership characteristics in different ways throughout your career. Just continually keep learning and growing, and you’ll be an agile learner with a long career.

How to Develop and Nurture the Qualities of a Good Leader

Organizations can strengthen leadership qualities and foster deeper levels of engagement at work through providing a variety of on-the-job learning experiences, mentoring, and formal development opportunities. At CCL, we have many award-winning leadership solutions with clients around the world, and we’d be honored to work with you and your organization as well.

But individuals don’t have to wait to begin strengthening these leadership characteristics within themselves. If you decide you want to work proactively on developing your leadership qualities and skills, download our action guide & visual summary of this content. And get our tips on how to convince your boss to make an investment in you and your future. We’re here to support you every step of the way on your journey to becoming a better leader!

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After you download the 12 Characteristics of a Good Leader, keep on learning and growing: never miss our exclusive leadership insights and tips — subscribe to our newsletters to get our research-based articles, webinars, resources, and guides delivered straight to your inbox. 

The post 12 Essential Qualities of Effective Leadership appeared first on CCL.

Imagine one of your shirt buttons: round, with 4 holes, holding your shirt safe and closed. Picture the thread that weaves between the holes, from one to the next, to the next, and so on, connecting the holes to each other and creating a tight attachment. The button may be pulled and twisted as you fasten and unfasten it, but when the 4 holes are interlaced well, the button holds securely to the fabric.

We’ve used this metaphor of a button as a memorable symbol of what truly holistic leadership looks like ever since the start of our original and now world-renowned Leadership Development Program (LDP)®, back in 1974.

The 4 Facets of Holistic Leadership

Like a button that relies on all 4 holes to secure it, those who take a holistic leadership approach find strength from weaving together 4 key facets of their lives:

• Self,
• Family,
• Career, and
• Community.

Now, we admit the button metaphor isn’t a perfect one. If you were to design a button to represent your own life — one hole for self, one for family, one for career, and one for community — it’s unlikely that each hole would be the exact same size. Unlike buttonholes, which are identical and symmetrical, in reality, these 4 facets of your life may be in flux or vary in proportion, especially over the course of your career.

But achieving balance doesn’t mean devoting equal attention to each part of your life at all times. In fact, we often say that “balance is a faulty metaphor,” because true balance requires understanding the importance of each facet individually and being intentional about how you prioritize your time and energy in each area.

Our decades of research have consistently found that leaders are most effective when they’re able to lead authentically. When leaders bring their whole selves to their roles, they’re better able to integrate their personal values and sense of purpose into their everyday actions, and support those they lead to do the same.

That’s why all our leadership programs now emphasize building self-awareness about personal values and understanding the ways these 4 elements of your life influence each other and work in tandem. This enables you to approach leadership holistically, with a values-based approach that leads to optimal outcomes.

How to Be a More Holistic Leader

Explore Each Facet of Your Life for More Holistic Leadership

While we may be able to compartmentalize certain behaviors — for example, committing to not checking work email while on vacation with family — theres no such thing as compartmentalizing our careers, our families, our communities, or even ourselves. All aspects of our lives are intertwined, interdependent, entangled, and overlapping.

Most leaders recognize the importance of making time for these 4 facets, in a general sense. But it’s easy to lose sight of good intentions, especially when to-do lists feel endless.

To bring a holistic leadership approach to your own life and be sure your behaviors are aligning with your intentions, take some time to think about how you want to show up as a leader and as a person. Ask yourself the following questions to boost your self-awareness and clarify your values and visions as they relate to each facet of your life.

1. Self:

• What energizes you?
• What gives you peace?
• How are you actively designing your desired future?
• What will you do to better prepare yourself to help others?

2. Family:

• Who are the people who love, support, and honor you? Who nurtures the greatness that resides within you?
• Are there people you need to grow closer to, or types of support and relationships that you need to nurture more deeply?
• Are there people from whom you need to distance yourself, in an effort to better manage your own energy and wellbeing?

3. Career:

• Are you just making money, or are you also making a difference?
• What do you want to give to your teams? Your organization? Put another way, what do your teams and organization count on you for?
• What is your hope for the future? What will you do to live into that hope?

4. Community:

• How do you serve others?
• How are you building connections to others?
• Are you establishing roots in the place you live?
• Are you helping to build a thriving community, whatever that means to you?

Integrating the Facets of Holistic Leadership With Intention

During the COVID pandemic, any lines that once existed between self, career, family, and community have become even more blurred. For many people who were used to devoting their attention to work while they were in the office and devoting their attention to their families when they were at home, the pandemic meant they no longer had the luxury of that clearly defined boundary as they shifted to remote work or began leading in a hybrid work environment.

Especially in the absence of physical barriers, it’s important to remember that the goal of holistic leadership isn’t to distribute time and effort evenly among your commitments. Rather, you want to make sure your behaviors align with your values. When you have to transition quickly from an urgent work call to a child’s homework question, are you behaving in a way that shows your child you value the time you have decided to take with them?

If you can clarify your values as they relate to these 4 facets of your life, you’ll have a north star to guide your behavior and determine if you’re acting in accordance with those values and living with intention at all times, even when something unexpected comes up.

Bring Your Whole Self to Leadership: 3 Tips

How to Live Out Holistic Leadership

Now that you’ve clarified your values, take the following 3 steps to adapt how you live out those values as you move through your day and make decisions about your future.

1. Define how you currently devote your energy and attention.

Think about sketching a picture of your personal button. If you were to draw in the 4 buttonholes proportional to your time and attention, what would that look like today? How are you supporting your own self-care?

When you think about how you currently spend your resources, don’t overlook your mental energy — your most valuable asset that fuels your enthusiasm, motivation, drive, and physical energy to live a full life.

2. Ask yourself how you want to allocate your energy in the future.

In 2 to 3 years from now, it’s unlikely that you’ll want those buttonholes to be the same proportions. As your life evolves, your priorities will shift. Take time now to set achievable goals that align with your values and priorities. Ask yourself the following questions to help you define your goals:

• Self: What can you commit to for yourself?
• Career: What is one thing you can do to increase your positive impact at work?
• Family: What do you commit to do to love, support, and honor those you consider family?
• Community: What skills, talents, and/or abilities do you have that you can give to your community?

3. Determine the adjustments required to make appropriate shifts.

In terms of balancing wellbeing and leadership, you give life to what you give energy to. If you were to look at your calendar, you’d ideally see a collection of rituals and patterns that reflect your values. Maybe your calendar shows you consistently set aside time to exercise each day. Maybe you work earlier or later certain days. Maybe you do a lunch date with your spouse every Friday. Maybe you call your parents every so often. Maybe you serve on a community board for an organization you care about or spend time volunteering on the weekends. Being very intentional about how you spend your time gives you a sense of control and ensures you’re really living your life in accordance with your values.

If rituals and patterns that matter to you aren’t a part of your life right now, and you’re committed to staying accountable and making them a part of your life going forward, you may need to verbalize your commitments to others. Does your supervisor understand that it’s important for you to leave at a certain time every Wednesday to coach your child’s soccer team? Does your family know how important your morning walk is to your mental and physical health?

Communicate your values and priorities to the people in your life so they can help you follow through on your commitment to being a more holistic leader.

Why Holistic Leadership Matters

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” Shakespeare’s Henry IV famously said to summarize the burden of kingship. In other words, it can get lonely at the top.

Most leaders can relate to that sentiment. Being in a leadership role, especially as you move up the organizational hierarchy, means dealing with a lot of leadership stress. Left unattended, that stress can cause failed relationships, career derailment, and poor health.

But if you understand that you aren’t defined solely by your career — that it’s but one aspect of your life, and is enhanced when you make time for every other facet of your life — then you’ve laid the foundation for overcoming burnout and becoming a truly holistic leader.

And as over 1,000,000 global alumni of our Leadership Development Program (LDP)® over the past 50 years will tell you, the button and its 4 holes can be a helpful symbolic reminder of what holistic leadership looks like, and that only by taking care of yourself, as a whole person, can you weave the life you desire and leave the legacy you want — as a person, and as a leader.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Leaders better understand themselves and learn to practice more effective and holistic leadership through our transformational, world-renowned Leadership Development Program (LDP)®.

The post How to Practice Holistic Leadership appeared first on CCL.