If you are concerned about developing as a leader, if you want more effective leadership skills, what should you do? What is the best approach?
Many books have been written on leadership. There are hundreds printed at the moment. There are also many articles and videos available on the subject. You will also find quite a few training programs, both online and on site, and many are very well produced.
But to help you navigate through all of these resources, consider this: there is a big difference between KNOWING something and DOING something. In the end, what you know is far less important than what you do with knowledge. When you are with people, are you applying what you have learned? If you don’t translate knowledge into action, it won’t do you much good.
Practically speaking, the best books, videos, and training programs do a couple of things. First, they present a model of effective leadership skills – they show you what to do on the job. The problem is that not everyone does that. They can contain a lot of good information on leadership principles. Hopefully the deal is interesting. You may acquire some self-awareness; It is always good to know what your strengths and weaknesses are. But what you really need to know is what to do to get the best out of your people. So, ideally, you learn about a model of how to act with people. If the resource doesn’t give you this, you are probably wasting your time with it.
But knowing what to do, having good role models of effective leadership skills, is only the beginning.
One training course, even a two-week course, which is rare, is not enough to make you so comfortable with effective leadership skills that you would not hesitate to use them with people. The reason is that these courses have a lot of topics to cover and there is not much time for classroom practice. It takes time to ingrain a skill to the point where you would instinctively use it in the real world of work. This is because it takes time for the brain cells involved in the skill to develop connections and form a network that makes the skill efficient and comfortable. You have to apply what you learned over and over to reconfigure your brain for the skill. The time depends on how many opportunities you take to apply it. The idea is to turn an effective leadership skill into a work habit, and that could take months or even a year.
This is how any habit, skill, or pattern of behavior develops. There are no short cuts. You have to do the job. And the only place this can happen is at work.
When it comes to developing effective leadership skills, experience is truly the best teacher. A smart manager relies on his interactions with people. For example, someone might say, “I don’t like it when you talk to me that way.” Or something could go wrong in your group. You may be trying things and they are not working. Each of these cases is an experience you can learn from.
So when you get suggestions on what to do as a leader, give them a try and learn from the experiences. If you do this, day after day, year after year, you will be involved in the best kind of leadership development program there is.