10.5 Ways to Enhance Your Leadership Skills

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here are my top 10.5 Ways to Enhance Your Leadership Skills:

1. Have a clear vision. Who are you? What do you stand for? What is your life’s purpose? What is your business purpose? How do you want to influence others? How do you want to contribute to others? The answers to these questions will help you formulate a concrete vision of your career, business and your leadership skill sets.

2. Know and utilize your strengths and gifts. We all have unique gifts and personal strengths that have developed over our lifetime. Utilizing your gifts and strengths will cause you to uncover your hidden leadership potential.

3. Live according to your morals and values. When your choices and actions align with your morals and values, you will succeed almost effortlessly.

4. Lead others by recognizing others. The greatest leaders are those who include everyone in their sphere of influence. They do this by recognizing and acknowledging each person’s greatest value.

5. Set definitive goals with a result plan. It is obvious that you have to know where your destination is before you can map out a plan to get there. To improve your leadership skills, establish specific life and business results (goals) you want to achieve and develop a timeline that includes milestones and completion dates.

6. Maintain a positive attitude. Make sure that you always maintain a positive attitude. Everyone wants to be around a person with a positive attitude. Negative emotions are contagious as are positive emotions. Also, when people are not positive it is difficult to take action. Yet when we are hopeful, excited and happy, we are more likely to take action, take risks, and attract new clients.

7. Improve communication skills daily. Great leadership skills include being able to clearly and specifically communicate your vision, ideas, skills, intentions, and expectations to others.

8. Learn to motivate others. Create a new shared vision for your team or organization and then begin to align your actions with this new vision. Use the resources and talents of your team to open up to new ideas. Surround yourself with a powerful team and utilize their strengths, gifts, and potential. Remember the more your give, the more you receive.

9. Be willing to learn from failures and weaknesses. The most successful leaders know that the key to success is not in avoiding failing, but in learning how to get up and start again. Most successful leaders say that they have failed their way to success.

10. Continue to educate and improve yourself. Great leaders continue to improve themselves in every possible way. The person who thinks she is an expert has much more to learn. Remember, if you are always comfortable, there is probably little or no growth happening!

10.5 It’s all about greatness: You must vision great in order to success great. Without a vision there is no greatness.

Leaders who are known for developing their people become a destination area for the best, most talented people. They become the touchstone for the creation of the next generation of leaders for the organization and the trickle-down effect can be the continuous engine that drives their company or their business for years to come.

© 2010 Dr. Laureen – all rights reserved