Promoting Leadership in The Workplace

Leadership is a lifelong endeavor you can never stop improving upon. There's no such thing as being too good of a leader, and the skills required translate seamlessly from your professional career into your personal life.

HRDQ’s leadership assessments and strengthening tools can help your organization develop strong leadership skills. There are a host of leadership skills training courses and activities that boost, identify, and discover your leadership abilities. Whether the leaders in your audience are newly-minted or seasoned professionals, they'll benefit tremendously from HRDQ’s leadership development tools.

Understanding Leadership Styles

There are four leadership styles that people must be aware of in order to be a more effective leader:

• Direct – Direct leaders have high assertiveness and low expressiveness. They tend to lead by taking charge.
• Spirited – Spirited leaders have high assertiveness and high expressiveness. They usually lead others by inspiring them.
• Considerate – Considerate leaders have low assertiveness and high expressiveness. They lead by building group harmony.
• Systematic – Systematic leaders have low assertiveness and low expressiveness. They usually lead by planning carefully.

The most effective leaders adapt their leadership styles for each situation they encounter. They need to know when to be flexible, when to negotiate, and when to be firm. They can “flex” their styles to work with others and lead them to success.

Becoming a Better Leader

A good leader exemplifies certain traits. They need to be open to learning and growing as they advance through their career. If they have buy-in from their staff, they are more likely to be successful. The success of a leader truly depends on their support staff, so they should ensure they are operating with honesty, transparency, respect, and dignity. Great skills to exemplify include:

• Learning Continually. As a leader, a person must recognize that they need be continual learners. The learning process never stops, and good leaders grow and change as time goes on.
• Championing Change. As change is constant, leaders must be champions of change—planning it, approaching it, introducing it, working it, and following through on it.
• Communicating Powerfully. Every part of the leader’s role requires communication skills. Leaders must become powerful communicators to get what they want to express across.
• Building Relationships. Leaders have to cooperate with people. They must build relationships to gain respect from others and work toward success.
• Developing Others. Coaching and giving feedback are two skills that leaders need to perform continually. To reach goals, there needs to be individual growth of everyone on the team.
• Solving Problems and Making Decisions. Problems will occur and decisions must be made daily. Leaders must become problem solvers and decision makers.
• Setting Goals. Leaders are responsible for setting goals for themselves, their team, and the organization. Setting and working to meet goals is an integral part of a company’s evolution to success.