Having leadership skills is important for a business owner to possess. What does it mean to be the boss? It is about being a convincing leader. Success is not guaranteed by being the smartest one in your company, or the one with the most expertise. Leaders have a vast array of particular skills that are well-fitted to times of challenge and change. These are the skills you need to master in order to be a true leader, and to be perceived as one by your employees.

Collaboration

There are four barriers that prevent or impede good collaboration: distance, dominance, discomfort and dissonance. Distance relates to people you do not see regularly, so make sure you stay on each other’s radar. When it comes to subservience and the importance of certain roles in your company, you should change your assumptions. Inform and educate yourself and your employees about the work of others. If there are things that create dissonance in your work environment and undercut collaboration – check, reassert, and change your systems and demands. As a leader, you should be a role model and be the one who will wipe away all discomforts and inhibitions that create collaboration disturbances.

Critical & Strategic Thinking

You will neither get far as you wish nor be as innovative as you can, unless you are a critical thinker. They are wary of generalizations and unproven theories, and question conventional wisdom. Critical thinkers are careful to check how their biases and affinities might impact their decisions, and strive to independent thinkers. This is done in order to prevent “analysis paralysis”, and speed up the good decision-making process.

Strategic thinking means thinking and planning in long-terms. It is good to step back from time to time, and take your focus from details and individual tasks and look at the big picture. Perceive your company’s major goals and set priorities aligned with them. Seek for technological and business innovations, and encourage them by backing good people who are not afraid to take smart risks.

Communication

Bosses who know how to communicate with their staff boost their team’s effectiveness. Mastering the abilities of interpersonal communication is thus a crucial aspect of successful leadership. Know how to find a master narrative in a situation.

Emotional Intelligence

Building your social awareness, self-awareness, self-management, and relationship management is critical for your group’s success. You cannot fuel your staff just with your IQ, but be a source of empathy, energy, and trust. Be realistic, but optimistic. Understand your workers’ jobs and how stressful it can be for them.

Administrative Skills

Having these technical skills makes a good leader, for it makes one capable for good organization, time management, solving various problems, and maintaining good technical and staff oversight. For taking care of administrative work and crunching numbers and analytics, you can take excel courses, and courses in business writing, presentations, or performance coaching.

Image Credit: wisegeek

Motivate & Provide Feedback

Never motivate your team members by using fear or by simply giving more money. Intrinsic motivation is more powerful than extrinsic one. Make them feel like part of the family, and motivate by providing purpose, competence, autonomy, and the possibility for growth. Also, deliver them information about their performance and value to the company. Effective feedback is key to performance management.

Coaching

If you fix the work of others and constantly provide answers to insecure workers who rely on your decision, at the end of the day you will feel exhausted and frustrated. Coach their growth instead. Help your employees to make decisions by themselves.

All these skills can be learned. And you, as a business owner and a leader, will feel proud and better about yourself when you see people’s improvements, knowing that you are the one responsible for that. What a great leader gets in return is appreciation and respect.

Author Bio

This article has been published by Ajit Dash. He is the founder of TechTrickPoint, enthusiastic about Online Marketing. He loves to develop Digital Marketing and and social media entrepreneur Plans also.

Follow Ajit Dash: Google Plus Twitter

Share and Enjoy