Continuing discussion on "What are Leadership Skills?"Trying to understand exactly what are leadership skills can be a challenge if you are trying to put it into words. However, As we had discussed prior to this I really would like to focus on the difference between Leadership Skills vs. Management Skills to help us define what are leadership skills. To be more specific I wanted to really focus even closer to those differences as it relates to being a parent to help better demonstrate exactly what I mean! As many of you may already know my youngest daughter is very good at fast pitch softball. She has a 72 and 10 winning record as a pitcher and she is only thirteen years old. She has been clocked at 53 miles per hour for her fast ball and 37 for her change up. To put that into perspective, college players have a fast ball in the sixties. Remember, she is only thirteen! Three coaches have already approached her to play for them next year. We are still considering her options. Keep in mind that she still has a great deal to learn about the game and certainly can improve in all areas. My wife and I have worked and dedicated ourselves to making sure that we are leading her in the right direction so that this may develop into a college scholarship of some kind in her future. With that end in mind, how have we gone about leading her and managing her to achieve that goal? Keep in mind that it is clear this is her goal also. She absolutely loves the game and it shows in her dedication to the sport! In our last discussion I explained that leaders generally have an emotional committed passion for a cause. In this particular example, the cause is helping my daughter achieve her goal of being awarded a college scholarship for her ability to play softball. So let's talk about what are leadership skills and at least one leadership skill that either one or both parents must have in order to be effective. That is the skill of recognizing the weaknesses and strengths of a person. If my daughter was horrible at softball and never improved at some point we would have to recognize that no matter how good of a leader we were she was probably not going to receive a scholarship for playing it. As parents we had to truly assess whether this was an achievable dream or were we just spinning our wheels in our attempt to help our daughter. As a leader within an organization, we must continually assess our personnel and recognized their strengths and weaknesses. Remember again that my wife and I have an emotional commitment to helping my daughter achieve her goal. We are leading her to that goal in the best way we can. As we had discussed prior the process of management skills along the way in our case would be resources to purchase the equipment she needs, to pay the fees to join various leagues, and to save for road trips to play the games. In addition, there is the management skill of time management! Truly time is one of the hardest to manage since once time is spent you can not get it back. Before we leave this discussion in this article on leadership skills let me stress again, that one important leadership skill is the ability to recognize talent. A true leader is able to see something in someone that they may not be able to see in themselves. This is one true sign of a leader and an important leadership skill. Then take what they see and inspire that person to utilize that talent, no matter what that talent is! We will continue to discuss this as well as additional leadership skills vs. management skills. |
