There may be no singular right or wrong way to lead, but there is widespread agreement on what skills are the most important for effective leadership. Not surprisingly, being an effective communicator is chief among them. Emotional intelligence — or emotional aperture, as one behavioral scientist calls it — is another. And if your leaders are do-it-alls who can’t get comfortable with delegating and empowering others, chances are they won’t have long-term success in leadership roles.
Since 2019, Training magazine and Wilson Worldwide Inc. have partnered on an annual Leadership Development Survey, asking learning and development (L&D) professionals how they invest their training budgets (and how much they invest), what learning methods they favor, and what leadership skills they prioritize in terms of development.
Over the seven years the survey has been conducted, data has been collected from approximately 7,500 professionals. All were employees of companies that create and use leadership development services with their own employees. Organizations were evenly distributed in company size, ranging from less than 100 employees to greater than 50,000, with the largest group (24%) having 1,000 to 5,000 employees.
The Skills That Matter
The Leadership Development Survey asks respondents to identify their top five priority leadership skills. The top two skills — coaching/developing others and communication skills — have remained constant every year of the survey. The
skills rounding out the top 10 have shuffled around somewhat over the history of the survey, but most have remained somewhere in the top 10.
In the 2024 survey, 11 of the 19 skills ranked changed their rank, which is the greatest number of changes in the history of the survey. The greatest decrease was in interpersonal relationship skills, dropping from 7th in 2023 to 12th in 2024.
The skills that rounded out the top five in the 2024 survey were team leadership, emotional intelligence, and strategy development and alignment. Here’s a closer look at some key leadership skills and how they impact teams.
Emotional Intelligence – The ability to manage your own emotions and understand (tune into) the emotions of those around you is an increasingly vital characteristic for effective leadership. Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, a behavioral scientist at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, calls it “emotional aperture.”
The ability of a leader to read the room, recognize the emotional landscape of their team, and identify gaps in understanding, helps build stronger relationships and fosters deeper connections, which in turn increases engagement and drives employee loyalty, Sanchez-Burks told Harvard Business Review.
Sanchez-Burks recommends seeking resources that can build and further understanding of group dynamics and collective emotions. Journaling about team interactions and your interpretations of them can heighten awareness.
Communication – This is less about expressing thoughts, strategies and opinions more frequently, and more about expressing them more thoughtfully. At times, it’s about communicating in a way that emphasizes you want all team members to be heard.
“True listening goes beyond waiting for your turn to speak — it involves empathizing, understanding the speaker’s perspective, and managing personal and group biases,” strategic consultant Alexander Loudon wrote for MIT Sloan Management Review.
Sanchez-Burks encourages skills building in what he calls adaptive communication — adjusting your behavior and message to fit the situation. Allowing a mix of emotions can generate different ideas. “Emotional diversity sparks creativity,” he states.
Strategy Development and Alignment – Strong leadership requires not only having the vision to see and plan for what your team needs to achieve in the long term, but also the boldness to identify when plans — even when they’re your plans — are taking you off course and quickly correct.
Listening and Empowering Others – This skill covers or is closely tied to half of those mentioned on the Training/Wilson Worldwide Leadership Skills Development list. Team leadership, coaching, providing feedback, motivating others, creating engagement, creativity and innovation… It all begins with listening to the smart, skillful members you work with and making everyone feel heard.
Kirstin Lynde, founder of the leadership development firm Catalyze Associates, told HBR, “Think about how you can, as a leader, get into a habit of dredging [team members’] imagi- nations and minds for ideas. Not only are you broadening your own thinking, but you’re also making others feel that their contributions matter.”
There may be no more powerful means of building trust among team members, boosting their confidence and increasing their engagement than delegating responsibility. Wellness writer and coach Yvonne Lee Hawkins calls it “the art of letting go.” But she cautions leaders not to simply delegate and disappear. Make sure that along with delegating responsibility, you supply the resources and support necessary for others to be successful.
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