Leadership Skills - Introduction

“At the age of seven, a young boy and his family were forced out of their home. The boy had to work to support his family. At the age of nine, his mother passed away. When he grew up, the young man was keen to go to law school, but had no education.

At 22, he lost his job as a store clerk. At 23, he ran for state legislature and lost. The same year, he went into business. It failed, leaving him with a debt that took him 17 years to repay. At 27, he had a nervous breakdown.

Two years later, he tried for the post of speaker in his state legislature. He lost. At 31, he was defeated in his attempt to become an elector. By 35, he had been defeated twice while running for Congress. Finally, he did manage to secure a brief term in Congress, but at 39 he lost his re-election bid.

At 41, his four-year-old son died. At 42, he was rejected as a prospective land officer. At 45, he ran for the Senate and lost. Two years later, he lost the vice presidential nomination. At 49, he ran for Senate and lost again.At 51, he was elected the President of the United States of America.The man in question: Abraham Lincoln.”

— Author Unknown

Many of us are acquainted with this eloquent example of persistence and determination in achieving victory. We read it, stop for a moment and then sigh and say: “Wow! That’s the stuff real leaders are made off.”

And in saying this, it’s all too easy for us to think about leaders like Lincoln almost as “mythological creatures”, separate from the rest of humanity and empowered by some mysterious quality that smoothes their path towards inevitable success. This is the view of leadership that many people have traditionally taken: That leaders are marked out for leadership from early on in their lives, and that if you’re not a leader, there’s little that you can do to become one.

However, that’s not the way we see it now. The modern view is that through patience, persistence and hard work, you can be a highly effective leader.
This section of Mind Tools helps you make a start in finding and developing these leadership qualities within yourself

Our first tools look at your motivation to lead – without a strong motivation to lead, you’ll struggle to be an effective leader. The Leadership Motivation Assessment helps you understand the strength of your motivation to lead, while our Self-Motivation Tools article gives you some useful techniques you can use to build it further.

We then move on to look at vision creation. This is a complex subject, however we look at one important facet of it: Information Gathering. Good information is essential if you are to build a compelling, robust vision of the future that people can believe in and want to follow.

And this is also part of Winning Expert Power, one of the profoundly honest sources of strength and power that you can draw on as a leader, and subject of the next article.

After this, we look at the important execution skill of Task Allocation – picking the right team – before moving on to consider the different Leadership Styles that you could adopt, and the important skill of Conflict Resolution.

And we round the articles out by looking two of the main roles of leaders: viving their team direction through Mission Statements and Vision Statements, and Delegating.