How Does Leadership Skills Contribute To Career Advancement?

Acquiring leadership skills is a must if you want to achieve success in your professional life. A good leader is one who is open to criticism, one who is ready to work hard even in the advanced stages of his career. Good team leaders are the perfect role models to emulate, and they teach their coworkers essential skills like objectivity, the ability to innovate, etc.

Leadership Skill And Career Growth

The ability to lead a team is a critical criterion that is considered by a company’s management while making recruitments. Some people have inborn talent to be good leaders, whereas others have to cultivate classical leader-like traits if they have to make steady progress in their careers. You can search online for leadership and management courses NZ to brush up on your leadership and management skills.

Being A Good Leader Can Be Of Tremendous Help To Your Career

1. Having The Ability To Innovate

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The ability to innovate means the ability to create a new idea or a design. A good leader must be a good innovator because innovation helps in solving many longstanding problems. Henry Ford is remembered even today because he invented the assembly line of production, which dramatically improved the speed of manufacturing.

The assembly line production broke up the production process and assigned specific tasks to different sets of workers. It was a path breaking invention, and it dramatically altered the way in which the manufacturing industry functions. Henry Ford is considered a great leader because he was innovative enough to recognize the reasons for the low output in the production process and then devise a technique that improved the speed of production by manifolds.

Being innovative leads to career advancement because a creative person can overcome the key challenges a corporation is facing. If a person can devise ways to overcome critical problems of a company, he will be very useful in improving the profits of a company. Hence, an innovative person becomes an asset to the company, and he is given plush promotion as a reward for his unique thought process.

2. Being A Visionary Person

A visionary person is one who has a vision for the future, and he takes all the steps that are required to turn that vision into reality. Today we see many ideas that have fundamentally altered the way in which we communicate with each other or the way in which we purchase goods and services. A few decades back, nobody would have thought that goods could be readily purchased via the internet.

Again, nobody would have imagined that people would be able to communicate with their long-lost friends via social media. But today, eCommerce is part and parcel of our lives. Some visionary leaders must have thought of these ideas at a time when they seemed far-fetched to others. But the visionary leaders persisted and changed their dreams into reality. Today the pioneers of social media and eCommerce websites are the owners of large corporations.

If someone has great visions, then he is bound to make good progress in his career because great visions shape the future. And most companies reward individuals who dream of changing the future and leaving a mark on society at large.

3. The Quality Of Being Accountable

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Accountability is another word for being answerable. A person who leads a team or a company has to be accountable to his organization and also to his clients. For instance, if a person is responsible for constructing a bridge in the city and that bridge collapses, then the leader is to be held accountable. The head of the organization responsible for constructing the bridge will be held accountable by the press and the court of law.

Hence, a good leader should always be accountable. In the above case, the leader of the company responsible for constructing the bridge should have all the key details and explanations as to why the bridge collapsed.

A person who is accountable is more productive from the point of view of his teammates and his parent organization. Hence, if you are accountable, then you will make good progress in your career.

4. The Ability To Communicate Effectively

A good leader should also be a good communicator. A person who heads a team is also the spokesperson of the company. He attends press conferences on behalf of the company. If the head of a company is not an articulate speaker, he will not be able to handle public criticism, or he will not be able to effectively convey the essential qualities of the products produced by his company.

Again the head of a team has to work with several hundreds of people under him. He may have to deal with many managers and clients in a day. If a person cannot communicate effectively, then he will not be able to handle client complaints or manage large teams.

If you have good communication skills, then you will have good convincing power as well. You will be able to communicate your stance effectively to other people, and this is very important for all corporations.

5. The Quality Of Being Empathetic To Others Problems

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An empathetic person is one who can sympathize with others and can also see things from another’s point of view. A good leader can understand the genuine problem of his employees, and he can become a person whom the employees trust and respect.

If you are empathetic, you will be a great team manager, and people will willingly share their problems with you and obey your decisions.

Conclusion

Today, many educational institutions have realized the important role that leadership skills play in shaping a person’s career. Hence many educational institutions have started providing classes and organizing workshops that enhance leader-like qualities in their students.

If your educational institute or workplace organizes seminars or workshops for developing leader-like qualities, then you should attend those seminars and workshops. Recognizing the importance of leader-like qualities early on in your career has immense positive effects on your career progression.