How to Become a Better Leader
First of all, let’s define the role of the leader.?
A leader is a person who is in charge of leading a work team, and that leadership involves several skills.
Trust
The ability to develop trust. This is the key skill that makes a person a good leader.
This means that the people who report to you trust you, trust that you are doing your best to achieve an objective that involves the whole team, that you are doing what is best for the team, even when they would do things differently.?
Trust is mutual:? the leader has to trust their team.
The ability to make decisions
A leader has to be able to make decisions at the right time, or simply be able to make decisions and do it consciously.
There are times when doing nothing is making a decision, and there are times when doing something and changing the course you were on drastically is also making a decision. Those extremes are decisions: we are going to do nothing, we are going to stay as we are or we are going to make a 180-degree turn and do something completely different.?
But the leader does not make decisions alone.
The ability to form a team
Making decisions does not mean that you need to have all the answers. No, but you have to be able to form a team of experts, so that these people can provide the necessary information to help you make a decision.
And here we return to the issue of trust: the leader has to trust in their team, in the solution they are offering. If those people are the experts in that field, the leader has to know how to listen to them, leave the ego aside and not want to take the credits. A good leader listens to the people in the team.
With all the information, the strategy and the knowledge of the different people in the team, the leader must be able to make a decision.
Humility
You will not always have all the information and all the knowledge. Other people may know much more than you about a subject.
Having humility implies leaving the ego aside, not thinking that you have to make decisions based on what you think because you are the leader. Just the opposite: being a good leader involves being humble, knowing that the people in your team are the ones who know. Listen to them, to really understand what they have to say. Don’t just listen to give them a reason why they have to do things your way.?
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Having humility implies trusting that the other person is telling you the right thing.?
And trust is mutual: you trust that people in your team are the ones who know, and they trust that you are going to take that information and use it in the best way possible for the team.
And so you can move forward because you are making those decisions. Many times what happens is that people do not make decisions because they do not want to make mistakes and they let things continue to be done badly or not in the best possible way so as not to take any kind of risk.?
Taking risks
That's another important skill that a good leader should have: the ability to take controlled risks.
At the end of the day, you have to take risks if you want to improve, grow and achieve certain goals.? That's where you have to be a good leader and know what you have to achieve as a team, how much risk you have to take, and what the impact is of the risk you took or didn't take.
You build trust in the team by doing all these things together.
Communicate
A good leader knows how to communicate. What does this mean?
It means that the leader knows:
For a leader, communicating well is more important than being an expert on something.?
Takeaway
Being a leader does not mean being the one who knows the most about certain things, but being the person who:
As Albert Einstein said, "The leader is the one who, out of the clutter, brings simplicity, out of discord, harmony, and out of difficulty, opportunity".?