How to Level Up Your Leadership Skills & Become a Great Manager

Are you a manager or an aspiring manager?

Have you ever thought about improving leadership skills at work? 

A great manager has the right vision and decision-making skills to take their team to the best level. They are usually empathetic in their outlook and encouraging through their words and actions. Excellent leadership skills not just benefit your team but your organization as a whole.

If you are looking for areas to grow as a leader, you are at the right place. This article will show you how to grow leadership skills through actionable tips and tricks.

Top 8 Tips For Improving Leadership Skills at Work

How to improve leadership skills in the workplace?

Building leadership skills require years of disciplined hard work. Some ways to improve leadership skills include work delegation, having a positive attitude, setting measurable goals, collecting performance feedback, and more.

Let’s understand these leadership areas of improvement in detail.

1. Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Every individual has leadership strengths and weaknesses. Identifying them is the first step in improving leadership skills at work. When you identify your weakness, you become more self-aware of your personality and overcome your shortcomings.

For example, some of us may not be good listeners. You can practice specific techniques like being more attentive towards your employees with proper eye contact to overcome this problem.

2. Be Empathetic Towards Your Subordinates’ Needs

Showing empathy is one of the best areas of improvement for leaders. By being empathetic towards your subordinates, you will put yourself in their shoes and better understand their problems. In this way, you can better listen to their challenges and help them overcome them.

Recommended Read: A Manager’s Guide to Improve Communication Skills at Work

3. Delegate Your Work

As a manager, you will have to handle multiple project teams simultaneously. It can become stressful, thereby reducing your productivity and decision-making power. In this case, ensure that you level up leadership skills by delegating your responsibilities to your subordinates. With delegation, your subordinates also become independent and more confident in their work.

4. Encourage Everyone to Ask Questions

Improving leadership skills involves asking many questions and encouraging everyone to ask questions. The more your subordinates ask questions, the better the scope for deep thinking and innovation. Also, they become freer to speak their mind and have independent opinions. 

5. Collect Your Performance Feedback from Your Subordinates

Collecting your performance feedback from your subordinates should be one of your major goals to enhance your skills as a leader. Ask your employees to give you both formal or informal feedback. Usually, organizations conduct annual and pulse surveys to collect employees’ input. You can create a section dedicated to managers’ performance. Also, if employees have concerns speaking out, you can collect their anonymous feedback with help of the EngageWith Anonymous feedback tool.

6. Be a Good Communicator

Being a good communicator is one of the best ways of growing leadership skills. Right communication helps you build a cordial bond with your subordinates. For instance, if you want to bring out the areas of improvement in your employees, use a constructive criticism approach.

Here, you do not just point out the problem areas but also tell how to overcome these issues. Also, you adopt an encouraging tone and motivate your subordinates.

7. Have a Positive Attitude

Improving leadership skills at work calls for a positive attitude in any circumstance. Sometimes, unexpected challenges can arise at the workplace, like sudden work deadlines, team not meeting project goals, overshooting of budgets, etc. A good leader quickly revamps the project strategy instead of worrying about the sudden change. They are hopeful of finding a solution, even through a dark tunnel.

8. Set Measurable Employee Goals

Enhanced employee performance is a by-product of improving leadership skills at work. But, employee efficiency will only increase when they have a goal to achieve. As a manager, you need to set measurable goals to track employee productivity. It could be either long-term or short-term goals. Ensure that your employees are clear about the goals and have a clear roadmap to achieve the same.

Improving Leadership Skills at Work is an Art

Growing leadership skills should be an ongoing and continuous learning process for managers and employees. Improving leadership skills at work requires being positive, communicating well, delegating your work, asking for employee & manager feedback, and encouraging more questions.

With the right leadership skills, you are better at making decisions, guiding your subordinates, and taking your organization to the best level. 

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