Effective leadership skills to drive workplace success

While workplace success depends upon hiring the right employees, effective leadership skills are essential to an organisation’s prosperity. The “trickle-down effect” is one of the most explicit examples of what happens at the top trickles down to the bottom, possibly infiltrating every division or employee of a company. 

Take an Honest Look at Morale within the Workplace Culture

One of the best ways to know that you’re running a successful company is to look at the morale of your staff, especially any who work externally. Are you hearing great things from the outside? Are you seeing smiles around the workplace? Do the numbers show business is good? If the answers to these few questions leave you with any doubt, then it’s never too late to learn how to examine the culture of your workplace. 

Analyse leadership for soft skills

Hard skills are the strengths and tasks that one acquires through academic studies or on the job. Companies require many hard skills to be successful businesses, from basic administration skills to complex financial and technological skills.

While hard skills help meet the basic standards needed in a particular role, soft skills play a key role in driving success, and even more so in leadership. Soft skills consist of a range of proficiencies that are crucial in personal interactions with others, such as effective communication that helps build good working relationships.

Soft skills empower leadership to drive success in the workplace

Good people skills are essential in any leadership position. These interactive skills are, to some extent, inherent, but one can also acquire them through learning and development. The first step is defining the soft skills that can create successful leadership.that 

There’s a range of different soft skills that are vital to our professional lives, but let us look in more detail at some of the most crucial ones.

1. Creativity
   As the fast-paced technological change continues to play a big part in our lives, process-orientated tasks that can be automated are already or will soon be automated. Hence companies are now more interested in finding people who can creatively approach tasks and develop new, better solutions to problems. 
2. Persuasion
   Motivating others to try something new out of their comfort level may take a persuasive skill to kindly defend or explain why it’s time to move in another direction for better results.
   
   
3. Collaboration
   For a business to progress, collaboration is necessary for identifying how to reach goals that are in line with the company’s mission. High-functioning teams typically accomplish beyond any individual alone.
   
   
4. Adaptability
   Adaptability is vital for taking on new challenges for a company to progress. As the covid pandemic has taught us, being able to acclimate and thrive under changing circumstances is more important than ever.
   
   
5. Emotional intelligence
   A leader must have the emotional intelligence to control their own emotions and help others stay positive, accept changes and challenges, and give guidance where it’s needed. It’s a skill that also involves empathy.

Empathy: A soft skills super power

Empathy is a soft skill that is not always easy to understand with multiple ways to interpret it. The other skills will soon be easy to achieve when you learn to be an empathetic leader. Let’s explore the categories and drill down to understand better how to use the power of empathy to become a better leader.

It comes down to engaging with your staff to learn what they may feel, what is to be them, being interested in their point of view, and being willing to identify their emotions and body language.

To be an effective leader, it takes time to listen and understand. A significant problem hindering effective leadership today is that leaders find it hard to devote time to interacting and engaging with employees. Management without employee engagement will never grow their skill of empathy.

Understanding the Value of Employee Engagement

An actively engaged workforce leads to positive and productive outcomes. With a higher employee engagement rate between leadership and their staff, companies realise a welcomed success requires continual commitment.

• Lower Employee Absenteeism and Turnover
• Noticeable Employee Investment
• Increase in Employee Productivity
• Decrease of Employee Safety Incidents

How to Improve or Institute Employee Engagement

It’s the responsibility of leadership to build trust through employee engagement. To improve or institute employment engagement is to open the lines of communication.

1. Make sure you arrange some time to get to know your employees by asking questions that will show them you care about them and how their position is important to the goals and mission of the company.
2. Don’t micromanage, but give them the skills to be successful and allow them to ask questions without fear of negative judgement. People only know what they know. Proper onboarding and training are good ways to empower your employees.
3. Honesty is the best policy. Employees need to be honest with leadership, and it is just as critical for management to be open with the staff. Constructive feedback can be a good way of improving the engagement of your employees.
4. Ensure that employees have a clear understanding of their roles and all expectations. When your company has efficient onboarding and training, you can assure new hires that you are well-prepared to help them build upon the skills they are already bringing to your business.
5. When you help your employees reach success, you elevate your own skills as an engaged and empathetic leader.

Conclusion: Leadership Sets a Company on the Path for Success

It’s imperative to identify your soft skill strengths and reflect upon how they can influence your leadership style. You may discover you need to develop your soft skills further to drive workplace success. One way of doing that is by signing up for Clevry’s free soft skills certification course!