9 Leadership Skills Guaranteed to Make You a Standout
Gender equality in the workplace is gaining momentum, finally offering well-deserved opportunities to women leaders. This is good news for women who have been plagued by harassment, salary inequality and feelings of insignificance for years. Katrina Lake, founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, and the youngest CEO to lead a public offering believes that decision-makers are starting to realize that being more inclusive of women is simply good business.
Here are some of the skills successful women leaders use to stand out.
1. Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage our own emotions, and those of others around us. It involves empathy, self-awareness and social skills. The more a person is able to relate to and work well with others, the more success she will have.
Margaret Dickson, a manager at Assignment Masters, says that she had to fight the perception that women are often seen as too emotional to be successful leaders. Many women have high emotional intelligence but it is also possible for them to enhance their self-control.
Dickson uses tools like meditation, breathing, or taking a walk to regulate her emotions and keep her calm when others are losing their cool. She will only act or make decisions when her emotions are under control.
2. Successful communication
Communication isn’t only about speaking but listening, writing, and using non-verbal skills too. The best women leaders are those who can listen and understand the perspectives of others.
They are able to hear what people are saying and what they aren’t saying too. When they can do this successfully, it improves their relationships and their ability to influence others.
Developing this skill may involve posing questions and being open receiving to feedback. Valuable time and resources are often wasted due to a lack of communication. When clear written communication is necessary, the usage of best essay writer or writing expert services might be helpful with clarity.
3. Creativity and innovation
A creative, innovative leader is flexible and open to new ideas. She encourages diversity, different viewpoints and varied working styles. Her team has the tools they need to be creative, such as computers, software, training and access to resources.
A woman leader needs to encourage a climate that supports creativity and does not penalize those who come up with ideas, even if they can’t be adopted. Creativity means having many ideas and innovation requires implementing the best ones.
An innovative leader has faith in her team when it comes to implementing the good ideas quickly. She is not afraid to change course either when necessary and will help her team to make adjustments.
4. Strategic thinking
Women leaders often have to deal with issues where market forces and external organizations have an influence. Leadership skills of successful women include being able to anticipate what’s to come. A woman leader needs to have a good understanding of the trends and forces affecting her industry in order to be able to make the right decisions and influence her thinking positively.
Men are often seen as having more ability than a woman to think strategically. However, women are just as visionary as men. They just tend to think about their vision in more collaborative terms and understand that they’re only as good as their team and want to empower others to carry out their vision and strategies.
5. Confidence
Women can’t be leaders if they don’t have confidence in their own abilities. Having confidence is not the same as being egotistic and only looking out for one’s self. It means being able to make your voice heard and make tough decisions.
Successful women leaders don’t become immobilized by fear of the unknown. They take action and don’t hesitate to tackle difficulties. When a leader is confident, those she leads have confidence in her and trust all her advice.
6. Trustworthiness
Successful women leaders are able to establish a climate of trust. This enables a team to communicate effectively, allow ideas to flow and commit to goals. Employees are more comfortable with embracing change.
To establish this kind of trust, a leader has to tell the truth and be open to hearing it from others. She has to admit her mistakes and be willing to correct them. She must be reliable when it comes to sharing information, giving credit to employees, and keeping confidences. When it comes to making decisions, she must be fair, make them based on the facts and be consistent.
7. Problem-solving
A woman leader has to be able to solve problems and think critically. She must ask vital questions, gather information and assess it before making a decision.
She must be able to understand her own potential unconscious biases so she can guard against them and hold her decision up to the standard she has set. She needs to question her assumptions and possible consequences.
8. Persistence
Persistence is required to persevere in the face of resistance. Women leaders are likely to encounter plenty of resistance in their journeys. If they stick to what they believe is right, they can make an impact and there is no limit to what they can achieve.
Women tend to carry more family responsibilities than men and men can use this to argue that they’re too distracted to be able to carry the weight of leadership. Sara Becker, who works as a writer for EssayWritingLab, believes that a woman’s ability to care for her family and work should be admired. It’s the very skills she uses in the process that can be utilized with success in the workplace.
9. Collaboration
Women are very good at supporting other women. They would rather collaborate and work in a team, drawing from others around them and helping to develop their gifts. For example, being a woman in the tech industry can be difficult, and joining a female tech community can make a world of difference. Joining a support group puts a woman in tech in contact with a community of women working in tech careers.
Weekly newsletters, events, networking opportunities and more give her support when she needs it most. Successful women leaders are thoughtful about nurturing connections because they not only make their work more meaningful but can influence their career trajectory.
Successful women leaders often innately have many of the above skills. However, every one of them can be developed. Learning them isn’t difficult but it does take patience. The ability to communicate, confidence, emotional intelligence and creativity are essential in the workplace.
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