The Skill Leaders Neglect to Their Peril
Make a list of essential leadership qualities and you’ll likely leave off an essential to success.
The top 21 skills and behaviors of successful leaders:
- Grit.
- Compassion.
- Integrity.
- Vision.
- Courage.
- Passion.
- Communication.
- Decisiveness.
- Loyalty.
- Emotional intelligence.
- Focus.
- Planning.
- Openness.
- Empathy.
- Humility.
- Bias toward action.
- Trust.
- Listening.
- Ownership.
- Drive for results.
- Big picture perspective.
You excel at a handful of items on the above list. You’re developing the rest.
The missing ingredient:
I’ve led many discussions about successful leadership. But I’ve never had anyone suggest the skill of receiving help.
A leader who doesn’t need others is egotistical, short-sighted, and disconnected.
Successful leaders need, seek, and receive help.
You feel more comfortable giving help than receiving it. Giving help is powerful. (But if you want others to succeed THEY need to feel powerful.)
Self-sufficiency is code for I don’t need you. It means you will offer help, but you won’t receive it.
Self-sufficiency limits potential.
Not needed:
When you don’t need help, you tell others they don’t matter.
Everyone, however, needs to matter. Self-sufficient leaders drive competent people away.
The greatness of shared vision exposes the depth of our need for help.
3 ‘help’ phrases you could use today:
- “Help me understand this.”
- “You’re great at this. What do you think?”
- “I’m not great at this. Could you offer some suggestions?”
4 ways to build a ‘helping’ culture:
- Publicly thank helpers. “Who helped you succeed?”
- Give help. Helping relationships include reciprocity.
- Listen to disconfirming perspectives. Some leaders only want to hear what they already know. These leaders will go where they have already been.
- Openly talk about the strengths and weaknesses on your team.
What’s on your list of top leadership skills and behaviors?
How might leaders excel at receiving help?
Dan,
You list many important skills leaders need.
I would add –Diagnostic Skills.
The best leaders have the analytical skills and emotional intelligence to diagnose people and situations.
Diagnostic skills include —asking the right questions and making the right observations to determine cause and effect relationship. Collecting and analyzing the hard data (numbers and facts) and the soft data (people’s feelings) to make sense out of the current situation and figure out what’s possible going forward.
Paul B. Thornton
Thanks Paul. Great addition. The assumption that we understand problems/challenges when we don’t results in wasted energy and squandered resources.
There are many, highly impactful leaders who lack this important skill. Dan, I think it also speaks to “networking”. Those who are successful networkers aid their organizations in becoming even greater. Those who are willing to network and share good ideas are more receptive to good ideas themselves – thus helping their organizations.
Thank you for bringing such an important leadership quality to light!
Thanks Harold. Effective networking includes giving and receiving help. Bonds are strengthened when others help us.
And I would add, not only being good at networking, but also being a good connector. Getting people together that can help each other.
You missed “Ruthlessness” of your list…
Thanks Mitch. I suppose in some organizations being ruthless is a key quality. I can’t help but think that there is a good side to being ruthless. Perhaps it’s when leaders face tough truths and speak the unvarnished truth. I don’t think that’s what you have in mind.
You remind me that you don’t need to be humble to succeed. Arrogant people succeed too!
Cultural awareness. Being able to effectively communicate across cultures.
Its strikes me that there is a presumption that you can call yourself a ‘leader’ if you hit the tick list of the required skills of which this gives us a great insight and menu to take from.
I don’t believe that it is a ‘given’ that you become a leader by doing so, it may be the case that you become a manager by divine right based on your role, but effective leadership is a badge that is earned and learned, someone who is not willing to go through a continuous process of listening, learning and self development is ‘NOT’ a ‘leader’.
Dear Dan,
An interesting post with good practical insight! The list of 21 skills/behaviors is quite exhaustive and covers all essential things for a leader to succeed. Yet, no one can claim that he possesses all these and doesn’t need anything further to improve.
I fully endorse your conclusive view that Successful leaders need, seek, and receive help. Self-sufficiency normally leads to an egoistic feeling and closes the doors of learning and upgrading the requisite skills and behaviors.
Every leader needs to have eyes and ears open to learning new things through self-efforts and inputs from other experts. It’s a continuous process and the successful leader always feel the need to upgrade himself and remain competitive & efficient all the time. The self-killing happens with a steady downfall if a leader has a feeling of “I know everything and don’t teach me” attitude. One needs to alter and sharpen many skills/behaviour in a competitive, changing work environment.
Asking for help reassures team members that they are valuable and reminds everyone including the leader that no one is infallibly talented and strong in every area. Thanks for a good post as always. Positively, Pauline
Dan, a usual you have hit a home-run with me and my business of Coaching. My area of Coaching has been narrowed to a selected target market, of which I served for more than two decades plus another two in the not-for-profit discipline of healthcare, known as the Nonprofit and religious leadership platforms. Asking for help is the number one need or should/could be listed as number one on the outstanding list you have provided. My chosen market is very limited in resources, so this is not a conscious path to getting rich. However, it is one of my two professional areas of passion and I know your highlighted deficiency of asking for help is one of the most pervasive impact conversations in professional leadership & management.
Great article. My take is that asking for help is an expression of a combination of critical self assessment, the desire to learn, courage, and humility. A leader has to be aware of a weakness or gap in knowledge to ask for help, has to have the desire to learn something new, the courage to take action to seek the help needed, and the humility to ask a peer, superior, or subordinate. As you infer n the article, one of the biggest impacts that seeking help will have is on the culture. Cultures of compassion, inclusion, and collaboration start with the words “Can you help me…?”
I find that the ability to say “I don’t know” is gone for fear of being seen as inferior. Invariably what you get is an opinion without any premise or worse an answer which could be more damaging.
Vulnerability is not a weakness. A good leader should be prepared to say “I need your help”