DIY leadership development: Develop leadership skills

Jason Yip
3 min readSep 14, 2024

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Learn the skills to be a competent leader.

Why?

A leadership title is not equivalent to having the skills necessary to be a competent leader. If you develop and demonstrate competent leadership skills, people will more likely want you to become a formal leader.

What skills to develop

There are many frameworks describing relevant leadership skills, but I’ll provide a few that I prefer.

The Art of Action

The Art of Action uses 3 categories of skills:

Directing:

  • Developing strategic direction considering goals, the environment you’re in, and current organizational capabilities.
  • Building organizational capabilities to realize strategies.
  • Giving direction by communicating intent.

Leading:

  • Motivating and inspiring people to follow a direction and perform their tasks effectively.
  • Defining and achieving the specific tasks for a group.
  • Building and maintaining teams.
  • Meeting the needs of and developing individuals.

Managing:

  • Understanding objectives.
  • Solving problems so objectives can be achieved.
  • Creating efficient work processes to get the most out of resources and people.

CliftonStrengths

CliftonStrengths (see also Strengths Finder 2.0) is a framework for leadership strengths but can be reframed as a framework for leadership skills. It has 4 categories for 34 strengths:

  • Executing (making things happen): Achiever, Arranger, Belief, Consistency, Deliberative, Discipline, Focus, Responsibility, Restorative
  • Influencing (taking charge, speaking up, making sure others are heard): Activator, Command, Communication, Competition, Maximizer, Self-Assurance, Significance, Woo
  • Relationship Building: Adaptability, Connectedness, Developer, Empathy, Harmony, Includer, Individualization, Positivity, Relator
  • Strategic Thinking (absorbing and analysing information to improve decision-making): Analytical, Context, Futuristic, Ideation, Input, Intellection, Learner, Strategic

Korn Ferry leadership competencies

Korn Ferry Leadership Architect (see also FYI: For Your Improvement) uses 4 factors, 12 clusters, and 38 competencies:

Thought

  • Understanding the business (business insight, customer focus, financial acumen, tech savvy)
  • Making complex decisions (manages complexity, decision quality, balances stakeholders)
  • Creating the new and different (global perspective, cultivates innovation, strategic mindset)

Results

  • Taking initiative (action oriented, resourcefulness)
  • Managing execution (directs work, plans and aligns, optimizes work processes)
  • Focuses on performance (ensures accountability, drives results)

People

  • Building collaborative relationships (collaborates, manages conflict, interpersonal savvy, builds networks)
  • Optimizing diverse talent (attracts top talent, develops talent, values differences, builds effective teams)
  • Influencing people (communicates effectively, drives engagement, organizational savvy, persuades, drives vision and purpose)

Self

  • Being authentic (courage, instills trust)
  • Being open (demonstrates self-awareness, self-development)
  • Being flexible and adaptable (manages ambiguity, nimble learning, being resilient, siutational adaptability)

This is how I see all of these roughly relating to each other:

Mapping of leadership skill groups across The Art of Action, Strength Finder 2.0, and For Your Improvement. Directing maps to Strategic Thinking maps to Thought. Leading maps to Influencing and Relationship Building maps to People and Self. Managing maps to Executing maps to Results.
Relationship between skill groupings across frameworks

Where to start? The skills that separate okay vs strong leaders.

I generally suggest prioritising skills development based on the specific problems you’re facing. However, there are a few key skills that I’ve found distinguish strong vs merely okay leaders:

  • Strategic thinking, not just the problem in front of you but broader context and horizon.
  • Problem solving — identifying and addressing long-running issues. Showing the possibility of a better future.
  • Communication skills, both written and presentation
  • Hiring. Facilitating referrals and a reputation of being able to get positions filled. Depending on the company and the larger economic context, you might switch this with developing people and getting them promoted.
  • Crucial conversations, that is, the ability to have effective dialogue during high stakes, emotional charged, disagreements.

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Jason Yip

Senior Manager Product Engineering at Grainger. Extreme Programming, Agile, Lean guy. Ex-Spotify, ex-ThoughtWorks, ex-CruiseControl