5 Easy Tips to Enhance Your Leadership Skills

  • September 3, 2020
  • Posted by: Hannah Johnston
  • Category: Employee Engagement, Employee Satisfaction, HR Strategy
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There are two dimensions of leadership:

  • The ability to get things done (Task)
  • The ability to grow great people (Emotional Intelligence or EQ)

Great leaders have these abilities in balance. Naturally, in turbulent times, it’s easy to become frustrated and impatient and drift towards a top-down task focus.

That’s why now, more than ever, emotional intelligence is essential, and leaders need to be purposeful about their behaviours.

Here are five tips for how you can enhance your EQ leadership skills:

    1. Build your self-awareness. Those leaders with high EQ are keenly aware of how others see them, and they manage their emotions when leading others.

Tip: Ask someone you trust to give you their perception of how you behave under pressure.

    1. Be empathetic. Understand that everyone looks at this crisis through their own emotional lens. Try to look at an issue through your team member’s eyes.

Tip: When a good team member’s performance in the office suddenly becomes unsatisfactory when working from home, make sure you understand the individual’s home work environment before confronting their non-performance.

    1. Be a great listener. Ask open-ended questions and listen actively.

Tip: Don’t ask, “How’s it going working from home?” Instead, ask, “What’s the biggest challenge you’re finding working from home?” and then shut up and listen!

    1. Manage your emotions. Take positive action on what is within your control and let go of your frustration with what is beyond your control.

Tip: Focus on what is going well without sugar-coating reality. Strive for an attitude of gratitude.

    1. Catch people doing things right. This is a challenge in a remote work environment, but if you really ‘look,’ you will ‘see’ your team members doing some really admirable things. Take the time to give specific positive feedback that is fact-based (i.e., free of your judgement).

Tip: In your next team virtual meeting, ask your team members to think of the best experience they had yesterday. Ask one team member to share their experience. Then, ask what they liked best about it, ask if there’s anything else they liked, and finally, ask what they would do differently. Close by thanking them for sharing.

 John Maxwell assures us that leadership is a learnable skill, so don’t waste a crisis! Use these times to enhance your leadership skills and become an even better leader!