In business, everyone recognises how important good leadership is. Effective leaders set the tone, keep team members motivated, foster relationships, and develop talent.
Organisations often invest in high-level training for executives and upper management, but may overlook the basic skills that all leaders, especially new and emerging leaders, need.
Ellen Hooper, director and co-founder of Australian leadership development organisation, The Growth Collective, works with leaders and managers every day, developing their capability and skills to be better at leading.
Ellen says many of the people want to be more effective leaders but don't know how. So what are the essential skills leaders need and how do you equip them for success?
We asked Ellen to share her insights into the importance of leadership in driving performance, and tips to make sure leaders get all the training to set them and the business up for long-term success.
Why leadership skills matter
In the modern workplace, people prioritise growing their skills.
A benchmark PWC report on millennials at work found 52% of respondents ranked career progression as the most important thing an organisation could offer (competitive wages came second on 44%).
Other UK research from the UKG group has shown that managers at work have more impact on people’s mental health than doctors and therapists and as much impact as a partner or spouse.
These studies show that organisations need to prioritise training and skills development for all leaders so they can manage people in a way that's functional and healthy. This includes line and middle managers, which Ellen says have the biggest impact on employee performance and often oversee the bulk of customer experience.
Build your leadership foundations
Leaders are often people who rise up because of their technical abilities or subject matter expertise, rather than their ability to motivate and lead people. But leadership skills, like any other skill, can be learned.
The key is breaking down the high-level results that leaders and their organisations value, e.g. high performance and psychological safety, into the practical foundations and fundamentals of leadership.
Ellen likens this to a pyramid that has self-awareness and communication as its base. On top of that comes the ability to provide context and set expectations for team members, manage performance by giving feedback and holding people to account, and developing talent. The pyramid is topped by advanced skills in creating psychological safety, building trust, and driving culture.
Understand your natural leadership style
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to leadership. Ellen recommends starting by understanding your own style of leadership and personal preferences, so you can use your strengths to lead authentically.
This also requires learning how to adjust to the preferences and needs of others, as Ellen finds most leaders are strong at leading people who are like them but find it challenging to lead people who have different ways of working and communicating.
So we need to unlock the ability to think about our own strengths and weaknesses and also the way other people want to work and be treated, whether that’s spontaneous or very planned, and their preferences for giving and receiving feedback, e.g. in a direct or more considerate way.
Ellen says bringing people who have different strengths and inclinations can be very powerful when it comes to innovation and problem-solving.
Task conflict not relationship conflict
Disagreements are inevitable when people work together, so leaders need to know how to handle and harness conflict.
Ellen recommends breaking down conflict into task conflict, so people are safe to challenge each other functionally about ideas or processes without it spilling over into personality or relationship conflict.
This can be challenging, but self-awareness will help remove personal feelings and to get people with different skill sets to work in a complementary way.
Connect people to purpose
People want to feel that what they do matters, so leaders then need to be able to provide context for their team members, motivating them and connecting them to purpose.
This is all about helping people see where their work fits within the broader organisational context, so leaders need to understand the company mission and strategic goals, how the team contributes to those goals, and then help individuals connect their everyday work to those bigger goals.
Give feedback and hold people to account
Research by Gallup found that only 14.5 percent of managers strongly agree that they are effective at one of the most fundamental skills of leadership: giving feedback.
Feedback is critical to recognising achievement and developing people’s skills, as well as correcting unsatisfactory performance or conduct. Leaders need to set clear expectations for team performance and behaviour, give fair, constructive feedback, and hold people accountable to those expectations.
Ellen says leaders can feel nervous about holding people to account and one of the most popular exercises she does with leadership groups is to brainstorm all the different techniques and interventions for holding people to account.
People usually understand that they’re able to promote someone who’s performing or to fire someone who’s not, but during the exercise they come up with lists of different actions, including having conversations with people, asking people to do work again, or changing the rhythms or structure of tasks.
Develop others
Part of being an effective leader is being able to develop people and talent. Ellen says that's all about understanding what motivates people and what they are looking to achieve in their working lives, then matching those career goals to training and development.
This typically involves working out what skills a person needs to develop and creating pathways to help them get them.
Ellen is a proponent of the 70:20:10 model of learning, where the bulk of training is done actively, at work. The other 30% is made up of social learning, e.g. mentoring, working together, or meeting new people, and more formal learning.
People often underestimate how much learning takes place at work and might favour training courses or higher education, but there is strong science to back developing skills on the job.
Creating an environment where it's safe to make mistakes helps people learn, so long as it’s supported by feedback and guidance.
Combining these skills
Ellen finds that leaders who develop these fundamental skills and can combine them in managing others become adept at motivating people, helping them learn and grow. This raises individual and team performance while also building trust, loyalty and psychological safety, and driving positive company culture.
Research has shown that people will follow great leaders or will leave leaders who are hard to work with, can’t provide clear direction, or who don't support employee well-being and growth.
She says this can have just as much impact as any employee value proposition that an organisation might have.
