(And that most leaders have an impact on!)
What does it take to be a strong leader in the workplace—and where do you start if you want to evaluate leadership? Leadership competencies are a great place to begin.
Truly successful leadership is all about connecting with your team, cultivating a shared understanding, and guiding toward a shared commitment to the mission of your organization. Do your company’s leaders translate your larger organizational vision to their teams? And just as importantly, do they connect this vision to day-to-day work to provide a sense of purpose? Do your leaders nurture a workplace culture that feels positive, supportive, and collaborative?
One of the most significant ways to bolster your company’s leadership is to help individuals understand how they are perceived as leaders and then provide them with targeted development and mentoring so they can refine those skills. To do this effectively, leaders should be assessed and monitored against a set of leadership competencies over time to measure progress and identify remaining gaps.
At Combined Resource Solutions, our Leadership 360 survey is designed to evaluate leadership proficiencies, on an individual and team level, to provide you with a more complete picture of your current leadership, improve self-awareness, enhance productivity, nurture engagement, and garner stronger business results. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most impactful competencies and how they can help shape and improve your company.
What Are Leadership Competencies?
Leadership has been described as a “social experience” in that it all boils down to the interpersonal connection created between leaders and those they guide. This social experience can have a huge impact on your company culture as well as your continued success. It can also have a significant impact on employee retention. Our 27 years in business has shown us that often employees leave leaders, not companies. In fact, 79 percent of employees today reported that they would leave their jobs if they felt they didn’t receive adequate appreciation from leadership.
Leadership competencies are categories and characteristics of leadership; they are skills that define what it takes to be a good leader. When these leadership competencies are effectively present, they foster stronger trust and commitment team-wide, which helps inspire and motivate team members and even boost productivity.
Without competencies, “leadership” can be challenging to define; every person has their own idea of what it takes to be a good leader. As companies look to grow their businesses, they need a unified vision as they fill leadership roles and nurture new and potential leaders within the organization.
It may surprise you to discover that only 14 percent of CEOs and other key decision-makers have the leadership talent required to take their company to the next level. Leadership capabilities help identify potential leaders and develop their skills. Here’s a peek at some of the most essential competencies that impact most industries and a majority of businesses.
1. Cultural Fit
Leadership starts by inspiring your employees to feel accountable and enthusiastic about their work, and that requires your leaders to have full buy-in when it comes to your company culture. This means it’s crucial to ensure that your company’s leadership is a good cultural fit.
The cultural fit boils down to how your leadership aligns with your company’s mission statement, but this fit is about more than just agreeing with the mission. You want to encourage your leadership to extend this mission statement to a daily, lived experience.
This kind of cultural fit helps to inspire organization-wide ownership. After all, how can you get employees excited about the work if their leaders don’t show enthusiasm? Good leaders help foster buy-in from their team, and that all starts with feeling good about their contributions in their day-to-day work and playing a part in delivering on the company mission.
2. Interpersonal Skills
An important leadership competency is how well your leaders work with other people—in other words, their interpersonal skills. Do they possess emotional intelligence? And can they harness this competency to connect with employees, peers, and consumers, and make intuitive decisions?
Leaders who demonstrate empathy, understanding, and attentive listening not only foster a healthy, positive, and productive company culture, but they can help ease tension during moments of conflict. Interpersonal skills also include the ability to tailor leadership strategies to the unique needs of the people who power your organization, customizing them to fit both individuals and the company as a whole.
3. Communication
Great leadership starts with effective communication, whether that is sharing the company’s vision with its employees, managing people and teams, integrating new operating processes, or addressing performance issues.
Communication isn’t a one-way street. As a leadership competency, communication requires building trust with employees and possessing a willingness to listen, learn, and collaborate. Most importantly, communication means not just sharing information concisely and effectively, but also actively listening to understand a diverse range of ideas and perspectives, and responding with empathy, business acuity, and compassion. This helps establish an environment where employees feel respected, supported, and eager to stay engaged.
4. Time Management
Time is a precious resource, and that’s even more true for your leaders who not only manage their own time, but also help employees manage theirs. Add to this pressure the fact that leadership’s time is even more costly to the organization. Your leaders are responsible for steering their team toward organizational goals, and that requires focus and smart time management.
While poor time management can lead to missed deadlines and overwhelm, staying on schedule limits stress in the workplace and supports employees as they work toward company goals and a shared vision.
5. Team Building
Effective leaders help encourage a sense of belonging and purpose, and that’s all about team building. Team building is an essential leadership competency because it fosters collaboration, productivity, and a positive company culture.
Everyone on your team brings their unique strengths to the table, and through effective leadership and team building, you can build a culture of collaboration, where each team member acknowledges that there is strength in working together rather than going it alone. This will help your organization achieve new successes, boost employee engagement, and increase job retention. When your team trusts one another, the shared work is stronger, more productive, and generally more enjoyable for everyone!
6. Self-Development
Are your organization’s leaders continuously looking to grow and improve themselves? Self-development is all about bettering one’s self for both personal growth as well as the good of the organization.
Leaders should prioritize their personal development the same way they encourage growth in their team. Self-improvement is crucial for any leader as their company goals build and evolve. When leaders focus on their self-development, they are also discovering a stronger vision for the organization.
7. Accountability
Another leadership competency that is essential for establishing trust and consistency between leaders and their teams is responsibility, which can be demonstrated through the ability to meet commitments. This follow-through sets the expectation for the rest of your team that, as an organization, everyone is held accountable for keeping commitments.
Additionally, employees tend to have more respect for a leader who sticks to their word. Great leaders build trust by demonstrating their adherence to accountability, and that starts by following through on commitments.
8. Change Management
Every organization is bound to go through periods of change, restructuring, and evolution; it’s a normal part of growth. Your leadership is integral to this process, which is why a critical leadership competency is change management.
Change management refers to the concept of developing strategies to help facilitate these shifts and set them into motion. For many of your employees, change can be stressful—so stressful, in fact, that only 44 percent of employees support organizational change.
Great change management can help ease these transitions and overcome any resistance your employees may feel to change. With the right strategies and the right attitude, your leadership can help your team navigate these changes without the stress and hassle.
9. Problem Solving
Inevitably, problems in your operations will arise. And when it comes to solving these problems, that task most often falls to leadership. A great leader embraces change and innovation, seeing problems not as obstacles, but instead as opportunities.
Strong problem solving in the business world also calls for decisiveness. Some issues must be handled swiftly, and competency in this area calls for leaders who can solve problems and make decisions with speed and confidence.
Discover How Leadership Competencies Can Impact Your Organization
Just as every business and every employee are different, every organization’s leadership competency needs will be different too. At Combined Resource Solutions, we’re committed to helping organizations reach their fullest potential by empowering their teams from top to bottom–that’s why we developed our Leadership 360 Survey, which is designed to:
- Improve self-awareness
- Foster employee engagement
- Increase productivity
- Experience stronger business results
- Enjoy sustainable growth
- Cultivate a positive company culture
- Create capable and confident leaders
Are you interested in taking an in-depth assessment of your team’s leadership? Discover more about our Leadership 360 survey here.