How to Check if Your Leadership Skills Are Good in Practice

This is a guest post by Alex Williams. She is a journalism graduate and enjoys writing about leadership skills.

“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” Ronald Reagan

Being a leader of a company means holding together dozens of different strings and making sure everything functions perfectly. This is much more difficult than it sounds and requires a certain set of leadership skills, including: organizational abilities, time-management and proficiency in communication.

One trait that only the best among the leaders have is constant re-evaluation of those leadership skills. If you want to be a great leader, here are some approaches you can use to check if your leadership skills are actually good in practice.

Analyze your personal characteristics

Are leaders born or they are made? Regardless of your opinion, it’s important to constantly question your personality traits and do your best to improve where you can. Some of the aspects you should constantly work on are: self-confidence, positive mindset, and emotional intelligence and communication skills.

How good are you at giving instructions?

A huge chunk of a leader’s job consists of giving instructions. The best way to assess if you’re good at it is to see whether your employees understand and follow your orders and, even better, learn from them. Effective practices for giving orders include providing context, being specific about the timing and the quality of the task, offering the employees an opportunity to ask for clarification, being respectful, providing enough independence and giving feedback.

Can you motivate your employees?

A good leader inspires people to reach their potential and strive for more. If your employees seem dissatisfied with their position and perform their tasks as robots investing the minimal effort to achieve the most necessary goal – ask yourself, are you the one to blame?

Are your customers satisfied?

Are the people who keep your business alive satisfied with your products and services? Believe it or not, this one is also on you. It’s a whole chain of reactions leading to the final goal – creating a loyal customer pool. While trying to get live feedback from your customers is always a good idea, you will get a far clearer picture if you give them a chance to fill out paid surveys about your product, customer service, etc.

Ask your employees

If you can ask your customers for feedback, there’s no reason not to ask your employees what they think about your leadership skills. If you have a lot of employees you can do an anonymous survey, but if there are just a handful of them, try talking to them personally, but they can’t be afraid of repercussions if you don’t like their answers.

Do you demonstrate discipline?

Ask yourself how many times have you missed a deadline? Write down each time and the reason behind the delay. Could that be prevented? If you are running late on important deadlines how do you expect your employees to meet your demands about being on time? Fix that by starting and ending meetings on time, being well-organized and implementing those habits in your personal life too. Only then can you ask your employees to do the same.

Who are you in a crisis?

Solving a crisis isn’t something leaders face on a daily basis. However, you must always be prepared to step in and be the best version of yourself. Evaluate how you react in such situations, and try to notice a pattern which deserves to be praised or needs to be changed. You can even ask your employees to imitate a conflict or a similar crisis to see how you would react.

Do you have a vision of the future?

Finally, a good leader will always have some idea of what the future should hold for their company. So, leave your obligations aside for a moment, and visualize where you want your business to be in five or ten years and how to get there. However, just having a vision of the future is not enough. You should also have the ability to present it to the people you lead in a way that inspires and motivates them.

Remember, evaluations such as this one should be done periodically, if you want to achieve greatness in what you do. Although a leader should reflect self-confidence, there is no harm in acknowledging your mistakes and working on improving them.

About the Author

Alex Williams is a journalism graduate and rookie blogger. She feels blogs are the perfect opportunity for presenting yourself to a wider audience, getting the chance to showcase your expertise and receiving recognition. Alex is a regular contributor at Bizzzmark Blog. Click here for her Facebook profile and Twitter profile.