What are Leadership Skills? Inspiring Someone!In our last discussion of What are Leadership Skills? we talked about the first leadership skill and that is recognizing talent. In this article I want to talk about identifying a second Leadership Skill. That is the skill of building one up or inspiring someone. Of course the someone could be an individual or a group. In our previous example we were discussing my daughter and her ability to play softball. She is a very good fast pitch softball player and is an especially good pitcher. As we had mentioned the first leadership skill is the ability to recognize talent or the strengths within someone. In my daughters case it is the ability to play softball and specifically to pitch. Her specific desire is to not only play well but turn that talent into a college scholarship somewhere. As parents we are leading her to that goal. Our first step was recognizing that she did in fact have the talent necessary to possibly earn that scholarship through her ability to play softball. As a leader within your organization you must be able to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of your staff. Take advantage of the strengths and understand the weaknesses. I think of building one up or inspiring someone as providing them with fuel, almost like gas for your car. Without fuel your car will just sit and do nothing. In short it will not serve the purpose it was made for. So in my daughters case of wanting to earn a college scholarship we as parents using leadership skills we must inspire her to go in the right direction. Just by telling her that she is great is not going to work! Anyone can do that! In some ways just telling her that may actually hurt your attempt to get her gong in the right direction. Why? Because she may get a false since of security and think that she does not need to work any harder to develop her skill more. I do tell her that she is a very good pitcher, but I follow it up with spending the time showing her how to improve on the things she already does well. We also spend significant time practicing together. I take this opportunity to provide her with feedback that is uplifting while corrective. For instances while she is learning a new pitch I might say something like, "Wow once you learn this you are going to really be hard to hit off of." Or maybe, "You are really progressing a lot faster than I thought you would on this new pitch." Now keep in mind that I speak to her in a more real way that what I have stated above. After all she is my daughter and we are real people. Just because she is doing so well does not mean she doesn't have a lot of work to do. I just want her to understand she is making progress constantly. I also want her to have a reason to keep on improving while helping her to continually see her goal. We also talk about softball a lot. She really enjoys the subject and I must say so do 1. During our conversations we talk about different techniques and strategies she can use during a game. I always stay positive about whatever the subject is. In the workplace there is a big difference between telling someone what to do and inspiring them to do it! A manager can tell someone what to do. A leader gives them the inspiration to do it to the best of their ability. There is no one way to inspire someone, because everyone is different. Some classes out there try to sell you on all these different techniques and some of them are good. But the bottom line is you must develop your own way after you get some good ideas. Otherwise you will come off as fake. But the difference between not having leadership skills, good leadership skills and great leadership skills is how you inspire someone! Remember managing is a process such as making widgets. Leadership is finding the right person to make the widgets and inspiring them to make the best widgets on earth. We will continue this discussion on "What are Leadership Skills?" in my next article. Thank You!
You will also recieve a download of several written warning letters you can use as examples.
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