Refreshing Your Leadership Skills
Why investing in yourself is an investment in your business
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When you’ve been leading a business for a while, you know what works, and it’s easy to rely on the skills that got you to where you are. You’re comfortable doing things that way, and your team knows what to expect.
As a leader, your time is precious, and attention naturally gravitates towards sustaining and growing your business, all while ensuring that those around you are well cared for.
Leaders eat last, as the military saying goes. But while focusing on the business and everyone else is sufficient for today, it isn't an optimal long-term strategy.
While many business owners spend a lot of time planning how to grow and improve their business, far fewer invest the same amount of energy in planning how to make themselves better as business owners and leaders.
Yet the skills and knowledge that elevated you to where you are today may not suffice for navigating the future. The external business world continues to change, and continues to require fresh approaches and a renewed mindset.
What defines a successful business owner and leader has also evolved. The traditional notion that employees adapt to the boss's preferences has shifted. Today, employees seek value in unique ways, necessitating managers to tailor their approach for each team member. While this may seem demanding, when great people are so hard of find, keeping them is imperative in such a competitive job market. It is the leaders who invest energy in refining their techniques and addressing blind spots who tend to get the most from their teams.
In my practice, I work with clients over periods of months and years as they work through waves of success, stability, and occasional failure. Struggling with doing more with less, balancing personal and professional aspirations, and navigating business turbulence are common themes.
But presuming that your years in the bank are enough to see you through is short-sighted. The road to excellent leadership is a long one, occasionally smooth, often marked with potholes, and always under construction.
Great leaders recognise that owning and leading a business necessitates continuous investment and re-design; not just in what you lead but also in how you lead.
The wonderful thing about leadership skills is that they are a renewable resource. But only if you regularly take the opportunity to refresh them. Leaders must be open to questioning their approach, viewing the way they lead as strategic, designed, and open to change.
Taking moments for reality checks is imperative - to refocus, reset, and refresh.
For many business leaders, finding time to invest in themselves is challenging. It is hard enough to balancing work commitments with life beyond it. Intentional learning rarely falls into the urgent or must-do category. Waiting for it to happen passively misses the opportunity to actively refresh your skills and reinvigorate yourself.
And for the experienced leader it takes courage to acknowledge that there may be a different, more effective way. The process of self-learning and renewal can be unsettling, requiring a deep understanding of oneself, uncovering blind spots, and hearing feedback that might sting.
But the reality is that for business leaders, the onus is on you. If you don't make time to continually improve as a manager and leader, no one else can do it for you.
The more energy you invest in learning how to be a better boss, the more your team will follow suit. As a manager, your behaviour is closely observed and emulated. When you show a personal commitment to learning how to get better at doing your own job, you’ll find that your team do the same. And that can only be good for business.
To help get you started, check out the exercise below:
Leadership Learning Audit
Research by McKinsey & Company Management Consultants shows that leaders typically benefit from development in three key areas:
Leadership of Others: Skills to manage, delegate, coach, motivate individuals and teams to optimise delivery
Leadership of Self: Skills to help you become more self aware, identify opportunities to play to your strengths and manage your weak spots
Leadership of Business: Skills to help you hone business operations
Take a moment to reflect on the above, and then ask yourself:
Over the last two years in which area (of the above) have you invested the most energy learning?
What can you do now that you couldn’t do before as a result?
What supported or enhanced your learning?
What are your most important priorities for 2024?
Which of the areas above do you need to learn to get there?
What actions must you commit to?
A huge thank you to Thrive magazine for granting permission for this piece to be reproduced and shared with you. It was originally published in the April edition of Thrive, currently available throughout Gibraltar.
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