A Guide on Strengths of Leadership and How to Develop Them

Leadership is an essential attribute and skill for bringing the best out of teams and departments in the modern workplace. Usually, you require different skills and strengths to contribute to your overall leadership capabilities. Understanding the skills and strengths you require to effectively manage teams in your workplace and establish yourself as a leader can help you record better workplace performance. In this article, we define the strengths of leadership and explore strengths that can help you become a notable leader in your workplace.

What are the strengths of leadership?

Strengths of leadership are the essential qualities that you can identify in people who lead, direct, or motivate others. It also includes the attributes that make up strong industry leaders and the skills that they employ when performing their duties. Generally, by improving your existing skills or gifts, you can develop these strengths for better performance. This is because these strengths are also traits that you require to be an effective leader and improve your ability to engage with diverse projects, personalities, and teams.

Related: Guidelines on Effective Leadership in the Workplace

Essential leadership strengths for the workplace

Here are some strengths of leadership you can apply and develop in your work environment:

Flexibility

Flexibility is an essential skill for a leader as it helps you adapt effectively to changing demands and circumstances in the work environment. When you make plans and projections, it's important to have this quality in your approach to tasks. This helps you make necessary adjustments when unanticipated situations affect your plans. You can also use this quality to widen your perspective and improve the quality of your teams. You can also adopt flexibility to improve your foresight when making plans by constructing scenarios that can affect them.

Cultivating your flexibility can also help you motivate your team members by prioritizing the completion of tasks over the pattern or form of executing those tasks. For instance, if you have a product design task for a team that requires a thirty-hour contribution, you can offer the option of three ten-hour shifts rather than more workdays with fewer hours. With this approach, you can help your team members feel more relaxed with the additional day off. You can also apply your flexibility as a model to encourage team members to be creative and diverse in their approach to tasks.

Related: What Is Flexibility at Work? (With Examples and Benefits)

Decision-making

It's normal for team members to look to you as a leader for direction. This relationship within teams makes it important to have strong and reliable decision-making skills. You can improve this ability by broadening your industry knowledge to improve the quality of your decisions. Your decision-making abilities contribute to your teams' efficiency and productivity as you can help them make decisions where limited information or data is available. When applying your decision-making strengths, you can also apply your goal-setting, evaluation, and research skills.

Team building

While your strength as a leader is vital to your team or department's success, it's also important to identify the best individuals for each task. By identifying individuals that work well on their own and interact effectively with others, you can pick a team that brings the best out of each other. When delegating tasks and motivating team members, you can apply this skill by recognizing individual abilities and potential. Your team-building strength also helps you listen for feedback from your team members and apply them when improving team structures.

This strength also requires applying additional skills, including effective communication, active listening, dispute resolution, and collaboration. You can improve your team-building skills by conducting regular team-building activities with your team members. Some of these activities include Secret Structure, Egg Drop, Minefield, Two Truths and a Lie, and Body of Words.

Related: 9 Team-Building Skills and Why They're Important (With Tips)

Problem-solving

When problems arise within the team, members usually look to their leader to resolve them. Your ability to trace the factors contributing to a problem and outline steps to resolve them is an essential strength. You can apply this strength when encouraging your team to remain focused in the face of challenges. It's also useful when making difficult decisions with limited information. Resolving problems combines analytical, critical thinking, decision-making, communication, and research skills. For instance, solving a problem requires analyses of contributing factors. You can then apply your findings to determine viable solutions.

You can also combine your problem-solving strengths with your communication skills by relaying your solutions to your team members. Communicating your solutions helps your team members implement your solutions effectively. You can improve your problem-solving strengths by actively seeking opportunities to solve problems. You can gain such opportunities by taking on new roles or volunteering for new projects with larger teams.

Related: How to Problem-Solve in the Workplace

Reliability

Your effectiveness as a leader relates to how well your team members can trust you and depend on your word. This makes it important to make promises you can keep and feasible projections. Your reliability also contributes to team strength and resilience as they can trust you to direct them through difficult circumstances. You can improve your reliability by setting an example for your team members. This involves meeting deadlines, developing backup plans, and communicating openly with team members. Reliability also combines skills and attributes like goal-setting, integrity, punctuality, and detail orientation.

Teaching

Leading a team effectively requires your ability to break down complex topics into simple conversational bits. It's also important to mentor team members and develop them into productive individuals who can execute their roles autonomously. By leading teams this way, you can improve the likelihood of team members rising to the position of team leads. In cultivating your teaching strengths, you can study your team members to identify their needs and the best learning styles for them. By adopting the best learning style for team members, you can highlight their contributions and encourage them to be more productive.

It's vital to combine skills like active listening, trust-building, motivation, feedback, and organization in applying your teaching strengths. For instance, active listening can help you acquire tangible feedback from your team members as you gain insights into their developments and needs. You can then use the information you garner from communicating with them to make the learning process more effective and suited to their needs. Active listening also helps build trust among your team members as they feel you prioritize their needs and pay attention to their contributions.

Empathy

Empathy relates to your ability to adopt another's perspective in understanding their situation, needs, or circumstance. This strength is essential to your role as a leader as it helps you connect with your team members. For instance, when developing plans, you can use this strength to gain a broader view of how your projections can affect team members. This strength also improves your communication with your team members, strengthens your relationships, and fosters creative problem-solving.

You can improve these strengths by being more flexible in your approach to issues, personalizing your communication with team members, and listening actively. You can also incorporate your empathetic strengths when interacting with team members by asking them insightful questions. This allows you to gain insight into how they're interacting with recent changes in the team or a new role requirement. You can then validate their feelings, provide constructive feedback, or take the opportunity to motivate them.

Confidence

Your charisma and impact as a leader rely on your self-confidence and ability to inspire others. With your confidence, you can remain positive in difficult circumstances and believe in your abilities to effectively carry out tasks. Having confidence as a leader helps you remain calm in your role, improves your productivity, reduces stress, and inspires team members. You can improve your confidence by emphasizing your strengths, learning from your errors, remaining positive, and setting clear goals for yourself. Improving your confidence also forms a good example for team members who emulate you, which improves overall productivity.

Innovation

Innovation is the strength you apply when developing new approaches, ideas, or perspectives to resolving problems. When leading a team, your innovation can take different forms, from improving production processes to innovating new software. Innovation is a vital strength to help keep your team competitive and productive. Like most leadership strengths, innovation combines a number of factors and skills. These skills include imagination, problem-solving, critical thinking, flexibility, persuasion, and design.

You can apply these skills in various aspects of leading and improving your team. For instance, when innovating a new team process, you can use your persuasion skills to convince team members of its benefit. You can improve this strength by incorporating feedback from your team members, challenging norms, and looking for new opportunities. Factors like location and the qualification of individuals in team processes also contribute to innovative strengths. For instance, you can change your work environment to gain new perspectives and approach tasks differently.