Leadership Quality & Skills

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- Interpersonal skills

Interpersonal skills can be perceived as part of social intelligence, but more relationship-oriented. It is also called the ‘soft skills’ of a leader. Leaders who have good interpersonal skills are all active listener, have good conversational and speaking skills, and have good personal relationships with friends, relatives. Those skills mentioned above will generalize to workplace relationships.

- Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence(EI) is the ability to communicate at the emotional level and understand emotions and emotional situations. These are particularly related to leadership “charisma.” To develop EI, leaders should learn to regulate and control their emotions, Practice expressing feelings and become an effective emotional “actor”

- Political skills

It is no doubt that in the core of every group or organization, there is politics. An effective leader is a good political player, who knows how the game is played, but can also manage political behavior so that it does not lead to group or organizational dysfunction.

- Conflict management

Conflict management is a “higher order” interpersonal skill, which involves helping colleagues to avoid or resolve interpersonal conflicts. A big part of conflict management is helping conflicting parties to collaborate (a win-win outcome) or to compromise (each party needs to be flexible and give up something).

- Decision ability

The ability to make good decisions or lead a good decision making process is one of the core competencies of leaders. A good leader understands when to make decisions, when to consult subordinates or peers and bring them into the decision-making process, and when is the time to step back and let others decide.

- Influence skills

Honestly, leadership is about influencing others at its core, therefore a good leader should be a master of social influence, and able to wield power effectively and fairly. To combine with the interpersonal skills can make a leader much more influential in a leadership role.

Reference

The top 10 leadership Competencies (1991) Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201404/the-top-10-leadership-competencies (Accessed: 2 February 2017).