Leadership skills you must develop

Over the last few years the number of female working professionals has increased across the globe. However, the representation of women in boardrooms, in mid or senior leadership roles is not significant enough. To change this, we must encourage young women to take more responsibility and nurture other potential leaders for the future.

Being a leader at work or in life doesn't mean you need to be the best at everything. It means empowering others to be the best version of themselves. This involves training them, boosting their morale, teaching them and helping them reach their goal is essential.

Legacies are not just built by one leader but also by successors who then take up the leadership roles after the leader. One important leadership skill is the ability to give into others and help them develop into strong leaders. Great leaders see people's strengths, often hidden, and help them develop the same.

If you want to improve your leadership skills or train someone to be a future leader, here are some pointers to help:

Be their cheerleader

Supporting your task force is a major role as a leader. Motivating them and asking them to try new things or drive them to take up a new project helps you create a sense of passion and a feeling of 'I Cant do it' attitude in individuals. By doing so you set an example of how they too should motivate others and ignite the fire when someone needs that push in their life or at the workplace.

Step back for them to step forward

There will be certain opportunities where you could let individuals take the lead. You could let them take up the presentation with clients after you train them. Prepare them for future tasks and provide them with resources necessary for a presentation or a project for them to take lead and become more responsible. Taking up responsibilities and roles helps individuals learn better and it helps future leaders to lead better.

Be their safety net

When you let your team take the lead let them know you got their back. As a leader, be prepared for the worst when you let them lead, so that you too are prepared if anything goes wrong. Young leaders need a place of refuge where they can recover, renew, and refocus. Let them know that it's alright to make mistakes provided they learn from their mistakes and rework on it and perform better. Because nothing succeeds like a good failure. Organisations that learn from failures go farther than ones that punish them.

Be direct with corrections

Do not play around. Describe wrong behaviours, mistakes and explain the path to success.

The goal is to guide individuals to correct performance or behaviour by identifying the problems, causes and solutions, not to take severe actions. If you invest in the development process and have the correct elements for success in place, mistakes and errors will be gradually reduced over time.

Constant learning

A good leader is also a keen observer and a good leader. She/he will constantly educate themselves and develop new skills to become a better version than what they were yesterday. If you want to build more leaders, make your team participate in activities that help them learn new skills which would indirectly help them perform better and also give them a taste of things that are not necessarily their KRAs! (Key Responsibility Area).

(The author is the COO and co-founder of One Impact, a digital branding company)