Gaining and Improving Leadership Experience

Leadership is not something that just starts one day and stays the same. You need to gain and improve your leadership experience to be successful. Here I break down how you can both gain leadership experience and improve your leadership.

Gaining Leadership Experience

To be a leader in a field, you need to gain experience in that area. For example, you cannot just wake up one day and decide you will be a leader in construction. You have to gain the necessary technical and social knowledge to become a leader in the field. Leadership is all about knowing what you are talking about and being able to interact with others to do your job, inspire others, and make a change. All of which takes time in the field to learn. To give you an example from my personal experience, when I started my own window-washing business over a decade ago, while I had little, I did have experience. I could not be the leader I am today if it were not for the time I took in my teenage years and early young adulthood working for others in the field and learning the trade.

To gain experience, you must be willing to take every leadership opportunity offered to you. Don’t shy away from challenges. Challenging yourself makes you stronger and lets you learn about yourself. Often the best opportunities to gain leadership skills are the most challenging ones. Leadership is defined by standing in the face of adversity, so adversity is sometimes one of the best ways to gain leadership experience.

Improve Leadership

Trial and error are ultimately how you can improve your leadership. Some of the best advice I have is to monitor your leadership style. For example, I try to have weekly check-ins with my team to monitor my leadership style. One of the worst things you can do is to give an employee a task and only check in 6 months to find out they did it all wrong. Your employee’s messing up could be your fault, especially since you did not check in to see if how you were instructing them was working. With leadership, you are constantly adjusting and tweaking. Your business will go through changes, so your leadership will need to go through changes to improve. Keep everyone involved so that you know what changes you need to make and what is working.

Gaining leadership experience is necessary to become a leader, and improving leadership is essential for staying a leader. You have to be active in your pursuit of leadership, or you won’t be able to be a successful leader. Look out for opportunities to gain more leadership experience and improve your leadership.