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Leadership Skills For All Jobs And All Seasons

Are leaders born, or made?

At first, the answer might surprise you. But if you think about it, to successfully lead and inspire others to work together as a team or in an organization requires a lot more experience, judgment, skills and sense of responsibility than contained in even the most natural five-year old leader on the playground.

Break down the concept of leadership, and you’ll find many components, career coaches and psychologists say. They range from the ability to see possibilities beyond what’s obvious, to knowing how to be pro-active and take the initiative, to organizing people as a team and getting them to carry out a plan. Whether an organization is large or small, public or private, if you demonstrate those skills at whatever job level you hold, you will stand out. The good news: these skills can be learned, developed, and refined.

For instance, one of the most tangible leadership skills that can be learned is public speaking. Whether your field is business, education, law, medicine, or anything else, you need to be able to communicate clearly with the people who work for you or whom you wish to convince to follow your plan or direction. But the very thought of speaking in public strikes fear in many people’s hearts. As with other skills, the way to learn is to do, and the way to gain confidence is to do it so many times that you know from your own experience that you will succeed in the future.

While some organizations encourage and provide such training, “Most companies teach you the technical aspects of a job but they don’t take the time and resource efforts to develop the leadership skills,” observes Robert Glacel, a retired U.S. Army Brigadier General who is now management counselor at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels. By contrast, Army Officers are trained as leaders from the start and, as a result, whenever they leave the Army, former military Officers find themselves in demand by industry and in the private sector.

For Army Officers, leadership training is systematic and ongoing. Right away, they participate in team-building field exercises during which everyone is given a turn in each step involved in the planning, implementation and completion of a given task. They’re then given feedback about what they’re doing right and what needs to be improved—both through formal reviews and informally from Officers who act as mentors—and they learn what techniques and strategies work well in which circumstances, which ones don't, and how to go about choosing the right tactic at the right time.

It’s training exercises like these that provide hands-on practice and actual experience in how to organize people, mobilize resources, and efficiently coordinate different aspects of a project to successfully achieve a goal or meet a deadline. At the same time, working together in this way emphasizes a sense of mutual responsibility: the recognition that everyone is part of an inter-dependent group in which every link must function well in order to accomplish the mission at hand.

There’s an old joke about how do you to get to Carnegie Hall? You practice, practice, practice. Learning leadership skills is a little bit like that. You practice, you train, you build experience and self-confidence. When the show is ready to go on, you’re also ready to lead.