Five Must Have Leadership Skills

Organizations spend over 50 billion dollars a year on leadership training. Much of it misses the mark. When pressed for a full pipeline of leaders they spend even more money to find new "potential" leaders only to find that many they believed had leadership potential exhibited little or no leadership qualities at all. No wonder corporations spend so much money on leadership. They are constantly involved in a non-productive cycle of hire-fire-hire again hope for a better outcome.


The vicious cycle of hiring, developing, firing, and costing even more money is for the birds and unnecessary. We too have spent a lot of money, (over a half-million dollars) but we have spent our money seeking to find out why, seemingly good, leadership candidates fail to live up to expectations.

A half-million dollars and 30 years later we believe we have a handle on what we call "Leadership Wilt." Leadership Wilt is an insidious disease that attacks organizations from the inside out. It attacks even the best leadership candidates among all organizations, worldwide. The disease attacks without warning and transforms potential leaders into managers that are weak, ineffective and even dangerous.

So, what did we find that would allow us to do a better job of identifying real leaders and helping them advance their skills? Through arduous research, trial and error, real commitment and perseverance we have identified five skills that leaders must have to function at the highest level. Those five skills are: Self-Awareness, Optimism, Empathy, Reality Testing and Followership. The good news here is that 4 of these essential leadership skills are measurable and the 5th is discernable. That being the case, lets visit the four that are measurable, first, and then address the one that is only discernable.

In the early 1980s Ruevon Bar-On and Howard Gardner began raising the issue of emotional influence and discussing how emotions played a larger role than originally thought regarding personal performance. Later John Mayers and Peter Salovey officially gave that influence a term-Emotional Intelligence and in 1995, Dan Goleman wrote the best selling book, Emotional Intelligence. From that early work sprang many tools designed to measure Emotional Intelligence, defined generally as "one's ability to recognize your own emotions and those of other and work the two together for good." Today, a tool called the EQi has become the most scientifically validated instrument for measuring Emotional Intelligence and because of its validity, the most popular tool used for that purpose around the world.

The EQi measures many fine skills but none more useful than Emotional Self Awareness, Empathy, Reality Testing, and Optimism. This is not a commercial for the EQi, so let’s talk about those 5 essential leadership skills.

Self-Awareness

Self Awareness may be the single most important of all five essential skills. You can not create that "presence," so critical to leadership, without being deeply, self-aware. Knowing yourself is the first step to understanding others and without others, there is no leadership. Emotional Self Awareness is large part of Self Awareness but, not all of it. To be sure, a superior leader must be emotionally self-aware but, also aware of your other strengths and weaknesses.

Empathy

Empathy is almost an extension of Self-Awareness, in that it requires you to see and feel emotions, but through other peoples shoes and eyes. It requires listening to others versus listening to self. Empathy requires you to understand others but even more, it requires you to emotionally connect with others. High Empathy levels indicate an individual has the ability to build the relationships necessary to grow spans of influence and create a more effective leadership bond with people. When people know you care for them, they begin to care about you.

Reality Testing

This is a term is really jargon used by the EQi people to describe one's ability to recognize the real from the not likely. Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, the writers of the Leadership Challenge share that people admire people with vision, and that is certainly true. But to lead you need to have a vision and be able to communicate it an inspirational way, but you better be able to explain the practicality of that vision. People are quick to abandon ship once they sense the leader's vision is not very practical or, at least within reach. The skill of Reality Testing is not a nice to have, it is a must have quality.

Optimism

Well, what can I really say about optimism that better expresses the need for it than ask the question; How many people do you know who rush to join a pessimist in an important journey? Probably not many, if any, I would think. Few wish to be a part of anything viewed in a negative light and to gather followers, one needs optimism. Most of us need a positive view of where we are going. Everyone want to be a winner!

Followership

I am saying that you can not be a good leader unless you have been a good follower. All leaders are followers and have been followers. So don't expect those who have been poor followers to morph in to exceptional leaders. They will not.

Now a word about my earlier comments regarding measurability and that Self-Awareness, Empathy, Reality Testing, and Optimism are measurable and Followership is not. At least, it is not measurable before you hire the person unless you have observed them, in action, at a previous employer.

For the most part, Self Awareness, Empathy, Reality Testing and Optimism can be measured as they are subscales within many Emotional Intelligence assessment tools. Followership can only be judged through observation, in action. Often we do not have the opportunity to observe a potential leader before we hire them but they can be observed immediately after the hire and from there on. Regardless of the method you develop for measuring the potential followership skill, training and direction needs be given to all to improve their contribution to the organization and their potential for leadership.

Previously, we have identified Four Essential Leadership skills that can measured before you make a hire and one that can be judged very early in the employment cycle. Organizations that insist upon the presence of these 5 qualities in their every hire have a leadership pipeline full of quality candidates with fewer surprises. They have profits that far exceed those who have no focused and validated selection system and On-boarding policies. Screen all potential leaders for Self-Awareness, Empathy, Optimism and Reality Testing and watch you profits rise. Offer followership training to all hires, early in the employment cycle and watch leaders grow. Avoid "Leadership Wilt," hire with a plan.

Six Steps To Recruiting A World Class Sales Force

Leaders of organizations spend billions every year to improve sales through various training and education efforts. Over 20 billion dollars are spent annually by CEOs wanting to improve their sales force. While I believe that education and training of sales people is productive and rewarding, much of this 20 billion dollars could be saved and used for other more productive programs. My recruiting philosophy is expressed clearly by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, in their book “First Break All the Rules,” wrote;

People don’t change that much.

Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out.

Try to draw out what was left in.

That is hard enough.

Don’t believe you can hire an average sales person and make them a top performer. You most likely can’t. My experience has been; it is far less costly to recruit high performers than it is to make them. That is especially true in sales. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says; the hiring and firing of an ineffective sales person will cost your organization a minimum of $250,000. So why don’t more organizations attack this problem before the cattle are out rather than make a suspicious hire and hope for the best? In other words, why not find the people with the right stuff in the first place? There are many reasons, but here are a couple that come up frequently:

       1. They don’t know how to do it.

       2. They feel they don’t have the time to do it.

Recruiting high performing sales people is not an easy task. If it were we would not be talking about it. There are six things you need to know and do to recruit a world class sales team:

• Know what you expect from a high performing salesperson

• Know what knowledge, experiences, and soft skills are required to be a high performer in that
   role

• Make certain that you have a large enough pool of candidates that possess those attributes to

   allow you to select the best from a group of 3-4 people

• Teach hiring managers to become expert interviewers

• Create a track for new hires to run on when they begin (they may build their own track but

   make sure you have one that works and can be shared)

• Assign them a coach who is rewarded by the results of the people entrusted to them
   (hold the coach accountable for the success of his people)

When I hear leaders say they do not have time to hire the best people, especially when it pertains to salespeople, I wonder if there are in the right role. Hiring sales people with little or no preparation is a prescription for disaster but hiring them quickly is deadly.

It takes time to sift through 8 or 9 average sales people to find just 1 or 2 superior people.

Be prepared to take longer to fill the position but expect the quality and productivity to be higher. Here are two excellent, financial reasons to rethink the process for hiring your sales team:

1. Superior sales people are, most conservatively speaking, 7 times more productive than average sales people (many will have to read no further to justify a commitment to hiring the best)

       2. Hiring the wrong person will cost you $250,000 or more

If one contrasts the cost of making superior sales against hiring them to begin, it is not difficult to make the right choice. Start making a difference in your sales team today. Develop a process that includes: A performance based job description, An Ideal Candidate Profile, Psychometric assessment of candidates, Behavioral style interviewing, Formal On-boarding, and Coaching. You can’t not go wrong.