Top 5 Leadership Skills – Do You Have Them?

Do you have what it takes to be a leader? Experts in leadership agree that the skills you require to be an effective leader are skills you can develop, but many managers try to get by without them. If you do not have the leadership skills you need, you will find that you have difficulty in motivating your staff members to perform at their best for the good of the team. If you want a highly productive, motivated team, you need to know how lead people. Here are the top five leadership skills that are essential for every leader to have.

• Time Management
  Click Here To Read More

Challenging Yourself Through Adaptive Leadership

Have you wondered why some companies seem able to handle whatever comes their way including the difficult economic conditions over the last year? While other companies go bankrupt, the successful companies deliver results over and over again. If you could look inside these companies there’s a good chance you will find adaptive leaders who remain invigorated and ready to accept any challenges coming their way while becoming change agents.
Click Here To Read More

Operational Responsibilities Of Leaders

The depth and scope of operational responsibilities within an organisation can greatly vary, yet there is one constant. Leaders are needed to integrate the vision or mission of the organisation with the day-to-day activities. It is fine to have a well-defined mission, but the only way true value can be reached is if the organisation has developed leadership roles, which take the business from end-to-end without losing sight of the defined goals.
Click Here To Read More

Being a Project Sponsor Means Championing a Cause

When talking about the positions on a project team, the ones that come to mind first are project leader, project manager and team members. Time is spent designing the project, selecting the right members, establishing the critical path leading to end goals, and establishing a reporting and measurement system. Unfortunately, what many firms discover is that the project still seems to get off course even with all the elements so carefully aligned.
Click Here To Read More

Leadership and Counselling DO Mix!

Despite what you may believe or have been taught in the past, leadership and counselling do mix. This is not to say a leader must be a psychologist with medical diplomas hanging on the wall to be an effective leader. But the combination of leadership and counselling functions is a natural mix because people will often need assistance on the job in order to fulfil their potential and maximise the application of their abilities.

In other words, a leader as counsellor is a change agent who is responsible for helping employees and team members turn abilities into successful actions that benefit staff and company alike. These actions should be company mission focused while promoting employee personal success. This is a key role of a leader and one that is often minimised in the daily rush to get products or services into the marketplace.

Adapting to Change Through Counselling

But studies have shown that companies which train leaders to build company success by developing employee success are more competitive and more adaptive to changing marketplace environments. In difficult economic times, companies that are unable to change as needed to respond to financial pressures or rapidly changing consumer requirements will quickly fade away.

People need help to realize their potential though, and that is where leadership and counselling functions merge. Through administrative training, leaders learn how to counsel employees on a number of levels.

• Develop employee skills to meet needs of the job
• Assist with resolution of personal issues within the work environment that impact ability to perform job functions
• Learn to recognise organisational leadership potential that can be developed
• Provide on-the-job training to employees that promotes success of the business
• Match employee skills to the right job or team position
• Assist employees with development of interpersonal skills
• Learn to manage difficult employees not performing as expected
• Identify morale problems impacting project success
• Learn communication skills so able to teach, train, and monitor employees as needed

As a change agent, leaders must be able to work with a variety of people while assisting them with skills development. In fact, good leaders as counsellors, focus on training employees to become leaders themselves within their abilities. Leadership training covers a range of activities from making good decisions while performing a task to managing a large number of people.

Adapt, Compete and Succeed

Being a counsellor as part of the leadership function, along with the other responsibilities of trainer, corrector and mentor, requires the leader to develop particular skills needed to build a team and keep the team on track. The team may be a project team, a department or even the entire organisation. Every organisation has multiple teams operating at once.

The job of counselling requires being able to consistently and successfully assist others to reach their full potential within their assigned position in a pro-active manner. As a counsellor, the leader will be able to effectively train employees, identify potential leaders, present information, match personal traits to expected organisational roles, and provide useful positive and negative feedback in a way that promotes employee improvement.

Professional leadership training can play a critical role in the ability of the company to develop its human resources to full capability. Since most companies invest heavily in their people, it only makes sense to insure employees are being utilised in the most efficient and effective manner possible. A motivated workforce that has internalised the mission of the organisation is one of the major indications a company is ready to adapt, compete, and succeed.