10 Essential Executive Leadership Skills

Executive leadership programs are useful in many aspects. The skills you learn from such programs can be applied to your career, your own personal development, as well as your own personal life.

Many people find it helpful and influential to their personal success and enjoyment of life after they have had this sort of training and actually employ the new strategies, skills, and approaches.

Key Leadership Skills:

These skills are applicable to everyone, whether you are the CEO, a manager or a team leader, as you can also apply the same leadership skills in all aspects of your life.

Building Trust

Building trust is the most important leadership competence, and at the same time, it is probably the most difficult to achieve. Many of the following leadership skills are also built based on trust and mutual understanding.

To continuously building trust within your team and other departments, you can apply the below tips:

• Open Door policy – you have to trust your employees in the first place before gaining their trust. Be open and honest in discussing company policies, conflicting situations, and show that you value the ideas and suggestions offered by your people by doing active follow-ups.
• By Actively listening and paraphrasing points, you demonstrate that you understand what you heard. When you truly listen you show that you have actually heard their input and trust in their contributions.
• Be sure to handle issues fairly and consistently. Integrity is crucial to having people trust you. When you are honest, authentic and clear, you will be more likely to earn trust.
• Always ask for feedback from your employees on your approach in daily communication and conflict handling. At the same time give constructive feedback to your employees and help them to grow personally.

Effective Communication

Communication is vital for everyone and is of top importance for any leaders. Communicating effectively can make a huge difference:

• Use appropriate language, tone and channels (written/ spoken) in different situations. Do not stick to one general route to communicate with everyone as that might cause conflicts due to a difference in mentality.
• Communicate regularly with your subordinates in an open and honest manner. Encourage two-way communication rather than with one-way delegation.
• Make sure that all information is delivered correctly, without unnecessary alternations, to all levels within your organization.

Cooperation & Collaboration

As a leader, cooperating with your own team and other departments can increase the collaboration between your team members and other staff within the company, and at the same time, by cooperating with people outside of your company, to achieve win-win situations and build interdependency between different skill sets, can be accomplished by applying the tips below:

• Hold team-building events within and outside of your own team. Cross-department team events break the ice between teams and build personal relationship among teams
• Take an overview of issues and involve your team and other team leaders in the decision-making process.
• Initiate and/or participate in cross-functional projects to tackle shared concerns, while at the same time learning from the best practices of other departments

Risk Management

Risk management is something easier said than done. Make use of the suggestions below:

• For all projects, you are undertaking yourself or with your team, brainstorm the risk factors and record them for reference and to determine further actions that may be necessary.
• Based on the trust you have built with your team members, encourage them to report any possible risk that they identify daily.
• Seek information from a wide range of sources and evaluate the risk from all perspectives.