Leadership Skills Training

The word “leadership” can bring to mind a variety of images

•  A political leader, pursuing a passionate, personal cause
•  An explorer, cutting a path through the jungle for the rest of his group to follow
•  An executive, developing his/ her company’s strategy to beat the competition

Leaders help themselves and others to do the right things. They set direction, build an inspiring vision, and create something new. Leadership is about mapping out where you need to go to “win” as a team or an organization; and it is dynamic, exciting, and inspiring.

Yet, while leaders set the direction, they must also use management skills to guide their people to the right destination, in a smooth and efficient way.

In Our Course, we focus on the process of leadership. In particular, we discuss the “Transformational Leadership” model. We highlight visionary thinking and bringing about change, instead of management processes that are designed to maintain and steadily improve current performance.

Leadership means different things to different people around the world, and different things in different situations. For example, it could relate to community leadership, religious leadership, political leadership, and leadership of campaigning groups.

We focus on the Western model of individual leadership, and discusses leadership in the workplace rather than in other areas.

According to the idea of transformational leadership, an effective leader is a person who does the following:

•  Creates an inspiring vision of the future
•  Motivates and inspires people to engage with that vision
•  Manages delivery of the vision
•  Coaches and builds a team, so that it is more effective at achieving the vision

Leadership brings together the skills needed to do these things. We prefer to look at each element in more detail at later stage in Our Advance Course.

_A compelling vision provides the foundation for leadership. But it’s leaders’ ability to motivate and inspire people that helps them deliver that vision.

For example, when you start a new project, you will probably have lots of enthusiasm for it, so it’s often easy to win support for it at the beginning. However, it can be difficult to find ways to keep your vision inspiring after the initial enthusiasm fades, especially if the team or organization needs to make significant changes in the way that it does things. Leaders recognize this, and they work hard throughout the project to connect their vision with people’s individual needs, goals and aspirations.

One of the key ways they do this is through Expectancy Theory. Effective leaders link together different expectations.

In business, a vision is a realistic, convincing and attractive depiction of where you want to be in the future. Vision provides direction, sets priorities, and provides a marker, so that you can tell that you’ve achieved what you wanted to achieve

To create a vision, leaders focus on an organization’s strengths by using tools such as,

•  PEST Analysis
•  USP Analysis
•  Core Competence Analysis
•  SWOT Analysis

It helps to analyze their current situation. They think about how their industry is likely to evolve, and how their competitors are likely to behave. They look at how they can innovate successfully , and shape their businesses and their strategies to succeed in future marketplaces. And they test their visions with appropriate market research, and by assessing key risks using techniques such as Scenario Analysis.

Therefore, leadership is proactive – problem solving, looking ahead, and not being satisfied with things as they are

Once they have developed their visions, leaders must make them compelling and convincing. A compelling vision is one that people can see, feel, understand, and embrace. Effective leaders provide a rich picture of what the future will look like when their visions have been realized. They tell inspiring stories, and explain their visions in ways that everyone can relate too.

Here, leadership combines the analytical side of vision creation with the passion of shared values, creating something that’s really meaningful to the people being led.