Beefing Up Your Leadership Skills
Are you a team lead? The team can be a work team, a sports team or a family team – most people lead some sort of team, whether they know it or not. Some people enjoy the role of leader, helping people develop their full potential, while others are intimidated or uninterested in taking a leadership role. No matter where you fall on the leadership continuum or what sort of team you lead, it pays to know how to shape your words and actions to help your people understand and want to follow you.
In 1938, Sears Roebuck & Company began an ongoing survey of their employees, looking to understand important yet difficult to quantify concepts like loyalty, satisfaction and organizational behavior. Their longitudinal study attracted sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists, all of whom parsed the survey results in a myriad of different ways. In many respects, this was the beginning of a strong corporate human resources focus. Fast-forward to now, when the science of the brain is much more understood, and the study results are shining lights on leadership behavior – the good as well as the not-optimal.
Let’s skip to the good news – brain imaging has revealed that being a good leader requires the synchronization of several executive-function areas of the brain, meaning it’s a cognitive skill that can be learned. Great leaders are made, not born, so if your goal is to be a great leader of your team, you can absolutely hit that goal. The attributes that great leaders share include:
- Clear thinking and vision
- The ability to make their people feel heard and valued
- A strong sense of purpose
- The ability to clearly articulate goals and purpose to the team
- The ability to publicly course-correct and take ownership of missteps
If you’d like some tools to help you work on your leadership skills, the world’s second-shortest podcast has you covered, as we often focus on leadership topics. If you have 90 seconds, you have time to get a quick trick to try in your quest to become a great leader.
- Need help managing your emotions? There’s a Tiny Bite for that!
- Need help seeing the possibilities in a tough situation? There’s a Tiny Bite for that!
- Is your team grumpy and argumentative? There’s a Tiny Bite for that!
Check out these and the nearly 600 other Wellbeing Wisdom Tiny Bites podcasts wherever you listen to podcasts and on the Center for Workplace Happiness website.
A good way to start beefing up your leadership abilities is to pick one of the five attributes that great leaders share listed above and focus on it for a month. At the beginning of each day, think about how the need for that attribute showed up in the previous day, how you showed up, and how you could have done better. Then, think about how the need for that attribute could show up on the current day and how you can mentally prepare yourself to be the kind of leader your team will need. When you role-play in advance in the privacy of your own mind, you’re actually training your brain to function more like a leader. And brains are very much like muscles – you can’t give them a good workout once and expect them to be buff for the rest of your life. Regular mental training focused on honing your leadership skills will help you become the leader you want to be.
Questions? Fire away! Success stories? Please share those, too. Looking forward to hearing about your growth and success!
Wags, Sandy Weaver, Program Director, Center for Workplace Happiness
Author of Happy Vet Happy Pet, The Original MBA, and co-author of The Happiness Recipe and The 28-Day Thought Diet
PS... Want the perfect way to start each day? Check out the Mind, Body, Soul Sessions podcast – something for your whole self, for just $7 per month.
