Developing your own skills as a leader

As a leader, you often don't benefit from the same level as support as your team do. For that reason, you need to be a little more self-sufficient about developing your own skills. Here are some ideas to help you do that...

There are 2 topics in this article:

  1. Asking for feedback
  2. Proactively developing new skills

How to ask for feedback
Most people would agree, that when it’s delivered well and fairly, feedback is incredibly helpful. Our definition of feedback at Navanter is:

Shining a light on something, positive or negative, that the other person isn’t aware of, and the impact their actions is having on their work.

If you take this definition, then you should always want feedback, because it stops you doing things which make you look bad, and it gets you the appreciation and recognition you deserve when you do something well.

Feedback is also just one person’s view on something, and not necessarily a balanced assessment of your performance.

To ask for feedback (and use it), you should do some initial preparation, then have the feedback conversation.

Initial preparation:

  • Review your objectives
    • Consider your performance against those objectives
    • Prepare questions to get another person’s point of view
  • The feedback conversation
    • Ask your questions
    • Accept the feedback (even if you disagree)
    • Assess the feedback
    • Act on what you’ve learnt (if appropriate)

How to acquire new skills
As well as receiving feedback from the people you work with, you will probably recognise as you go through your career that there are certain new skills you need as you develop.

Acquiring new skills doesn’t necessarily come from reading a book or attending a training course. There are other ways which can be more effective, depending on the type of skill.
 
Here’s Navanter’s process for successfully acquiring a new skill when you need it:

  1. Define clearly the skill you need to acquire
  2. Set personal expectations
  3. Learn the theory… briefly
  4. Get the expert view
  5. Practise the skill
  6. Analyse your results and tweak your plan

If you follow this process, you can gradually add to your skill set on the job as the need arises, and ensure you continue to grow in your career.

Location: Manchester, Royaume-Uni

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The NPSI styles: Realist

Image
Welcome back as we continue our journey through the different personality styles of the Navanter Personality Styles Instrument. If you missed the previous parts of this section, you can start here . Motivation: Achievement and control The Realist is an achiever – this person likes to have a goal, and will proactively work to achieve that goal through motivated working, and through moving problems aside as they are encountered. Achieving the goal is more important than how it is achieved, however, and there’s a danger that there may be casualties along the way. Words chosen: Verbs and directing words The Realist chooses words which encourage action – lots of verbs and instructions for people. The Realist prefers it when people don’t push back on instructions, as this can delay the objective being achieved. The Realist likes to get to the point quickly, and has little time for small talk. Words like “I need” rather than “I like” can be over-used. Tone of voice: Confide
Read more

Critical thinking - scanning the environment

Image
The first place to look for opportunities and problems is within the organisation. For this, you can use a STACK analysis to get a good understanding of the current situation in the business. Strategy Tolerance for risk & change Available resources Configuration Knowledge & skills A STACK analysis helps us to do a few things: Get a good understanding of the current state of the organisation and its readiness to implement change Understand how well-aligned the organisation is from the top, where strategy is developed, down to individual contributors Consider whether there are sufficient resources to take actions you need Identify whether the way the organisation is set up would be helpful to grasping opportunities or addressing problems Understand whether additional expertise might need to be brought in from outside. Once you’ve understood the internal situation in the organisation, it’s time to look at whats going on externally which could affect your strategy. For this
Read more

Understanding where problems (and opportunities) have come from

Image
If you can understand the conditions which caused a problem to develop or an opportunity to come along, then you’ll be able to think about how you can replicate those conditions (for opportunities), or change them (for problems). For example, if you realise that an opportunity presented itself which you were only able to take advantage of because of your proactive recruitment strategy, you’ll want to continue that strategy in the future. 5 Whys The 5 Whys technique encourages you to look not at superficial causes, but to look deeper for root causes. For example, imagine you’re waiting for a train and an announcement comes over the loudspeaker saying: “Your train is delayed due to the late arrival of a preceding service.” You likely find this frustrating because it’s not a real reason for the delay – you want to know why the preceding service was running late. The idea with 5 Whys is that you keep asking “why?” until it feels like a daft question. This is likely to be around 5 times. Th
Read more