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Leadership is an essential life skill, not just a work skill. No matter who we are or what we do, each one of us is required to lead in some situation or the other; personal or professional.

Do not allow this seemingly heavy word to confuse you. One way to keep things really simple is to remember that leadership is about helping people around you (personal and professional) learn and grow, so that they feel encouraged and empowered to function independently and resiliently.

This is much easier to accomplish if you retain the right balance – that is, you ensure you have distributed your time and energy into developing yourself (Thought Leadership), building strong, learning relationships (in which both you and the other person learn and grow, ie. People Leadership) and developing critical skills that enable you to meet organizational AND personal goals (Results Leadership).

You will probably agree that managing people (or even maintaining healthy, functional relationships with people even if you are not a team leader) is a highly complex tasks involving many things; developing trust, motivating, influencing, engaging people, managing conflicts, managing your emotions when dealing with diverse people to name a few.

If you do not invest enough time and effort in this, you will find there is a cap on how far you can advance professionally. Remember, the higher you go up the corporate food chain, the more critical your people skills become.

People Leadership is what allows you to engage your team members, build trust and collaboration and deliver results that only high performing teams can deliver.  They are also critical to helping you attract, develop, utilize and retain quality talent and prepare an effective succession plan for yourself and the organisation.

The short answer is that you may as well keep your resume handy at all times then, since organisations pay us to deliver specific results.

Demonstrating results communicates that we have mastered the art of converting our competence, skills and confidence into performance. This is what gets us the requisite appreciation and career advancement we may desire. And even if are one of the content types and do not seek promotion, please remember that delivering results gets you appreciation and acknowledgment. And of course, usually a bigger bonus and ⁄ or pay hike – those most of us seldom say no to.

Leadership is an essential life skill, not just a work skill. No matter who we are or what we do, each one of us is required to lead in some situation or the other; personal or professional.

Do not allow this seemingly heavy word to confuse you. One way to keep things really simple is to remember that leadership is about helping people around you (personal and professional) learn and grow, so that they feel encouraged and empowered to function independently and resiliently.

This is much easier to accomplish if you retain the right balance – that is, you ensure you have distributed your time and energy into developing yourself (Thought Leadership), building strong, learning relationships (in which both you and the other person learn and grow, ie. People Leadership) and developing critical skills that enable you to meet organizational AND personal goals (Results Leadership).

The simplest, surest and fast way to develop your decision-making skills is to become aware of the PROCESS you are using to make decision. Most of us make decisions so swiftly and intuitively that we may not realise it, but the process usually involves a few clear steps. Most processes would involve:

1. Identifying the problem that we need to solve, and thus what specifically is the decision we need to make to do so.
2. Looking at the relevant data required to make that decision.
3. Analyzing the data to generate ⁄ review the options available to us.
4. Looking at the pros, cons and ease or difficulty of these options to prioritse them.
5. Predict possible outcomes and assess the consequences.
6. Assess risk factors to determine certainty vs uncertainty of decisions made.
7. Picking the one we believe would best serve us.

This process comes into play for ALL decisions, big and small. However, obviously the time we spend of each step would be determined by the gravity of the decision we seek to make and its attendant consequences. For example, you may spend much less time of WHETHER to marry as compared to WHOM to marry. Right?

And yes, using a mindful process not only gets you sounder decisions, it also enables you to SELL your decisions to other stakeholders, if ⁄ where required.

So firstly, become aware of your process and secondly, practice it mindfully as often as you can, for decisions big and small.

Thirdly, consult others to seek the advantage of different perspectives. And lastly, remember that is good to place a timeline on your decision and be prepared with alternative plans.

This is a fairly common occurrence. There are many reasons for this, one of the most important ones being low team psychological safety or trust in the team. Here the individual may not wish to offer any ideas or suggestions because they fear they will be judged or because they have not been given opportunities or encouragement to do so by their superiors, many of whom might believe it is easier to tell people what to do, in the interest of time.

Remember that telling people what to do is ok in situations where time or special considerations come into play. However, whenever you tell someone what to do, you are not giving them the opportunity to develop their thinking and they will usually not demonstrate the desired level of ownership (buying into the solution).

So the best way to offer suggestions or ideas is to phrase them as questions. For example, Have you considered trying this… Or what do you think will happen if we did this… or what if we did this…

The simplest, surest and fast way to develop your decision-making skills is to become aware of the PROCESS you are using to make decision. Most of us make decisions so swiftly and intuitively that we may not realise it, but the process usually involves a few clear steps. Most processes would involve:

1. Identifying the problem that we need to solve, and thus what specifically is the decision we need to make to do so.
2. Looking at the relevant data required to make that decision.
3. Analyzing the data to generate ⁄ review the options available to us.
4. Looking at the pros, cons and ease or difficulty of these options to prioritse them.
5. Predict possible outcomes and assess the consequences.
6. Assess risk factors to determine certainty vs uncertainty of decisions made.
7. Picking the one we believe would best serve us.

This process comes into play for ALL decisions, big and small. However, obviously the time we spend of each step would be determined by the gravity of the decision we seek to make and its attendant consequences. For example, you may spend much less time of WHETHER to marry as compared to WHOM to marry. Right?

And yes, using a mindful process not only gets you sounder decisions, it also enables you to SELL your decisions to other stakeholders, if ⁄ where required.

So firstly, become aware of your process and secondly, practice it mindfully as often as you can, for decisions big and small.

Thirdly, consult others to seek the advantage of different perspectives. And lastly, remember that is good to place a timeline on your decision and be prepared with alternative plans.

Leadership is an essential life skill, not just a work skill. No matter who we are or what we do, each one of us is required to lead in some situation or the other; personal or professional.

Do not allow this seemingly heavy word to confuse you. One way to keep things really simple is to remember that leadership is about helping people around you (personal and professional) learn and grow, so that they feel encouraged and empowered to function independently and resiliently.

This is much easier to accomplish if you retain the right balance – that is, you ensure you have distributed your time and energy into developing yourself (Thought Leadership), building strong, learning relationships (in which both you and the other person learn and grow, ie. People Leadership) and developing critical skills that enable you to meet organizational AND personal goals (Results Leadership).

This is a problem most busy managers face.

Firstly. It is good that you recognise the importance of helping them with their career development, because when people don’t see clear progression they tend to move on.

Secondly, be careful not to fall into the trap of focusing all your attention on those of your direct reports who demonstrate more accountability and the desire to own their career development. This can happen very easily and, in a way is even understandable. However, we need to be fair and ensure we extend equal opportunity to everyone reporting to us. After all, their development and empowerment is one of our primary responsibilities.

That’s why you could do simple things like:

1. Schedule a career development conversation with each of the direct reports; perhaps with one of them every month; so that you have at least 2 with each person every year.
2. Those who do not appear keen to take charge of their careers, use your monthly 1-to-1 catch-ups to find out what their aspirations are; everyone has them, and not everyone is career-focused. And they may have other stuff going on in their lives, so this may not be the right time for them. If it is not, you need to let them know you’re available when they are ready.

To sum up, I would say that giving your direct reports equal opportunity means that you try to find out what THEY want and see if and how you can help them achieve that.

Also, please help your direct reports realise the importance of demonstrating more accountability – being proactive, offering suggestions, giving progress reports in time, escalating issues before they become problems… in short, making themselves an attractive investment option.