Why It Is Important For All Employees To Lead

Today's world of work requires a more diverse skill set from employees than ever before. Employees must collaborate with more people, navigate matrixed structures, address rapid change, and lead in uncertain situations. This monumental shift in how work is done has created a strong demand for employees to demonstrate leadership skills at all organizational levels.?

The World Economic Forum recently released its list of the top 10 job skills for 2025. A quick look at the list below reveals this new reality. You will see that the top 9 skills listed in their top 10 list were once reserved primarily for traditional leadership roles. This marks a tremendous change for employees and their employers.

1. Analytical thinking and innovation
2. Active learning and learning strategies
3. Complex problem-solving
4. Critical thinking and analysis
5. Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility
6. Creativity, originality, and initiative
7. Leadership and social influence
8. Reasoning, problem-solving, and ideation
9. Emotional intelligence
10. Technology design and programming

Who We Are Is How We Lead

Organizations need employees who can continually evolve their lens, frameworks, and actions to address the ongoing complex challenges they will encounter in today's working environment. Self-Leadership is the fundamental skill set that enables leaders, managers, and employees to demonstrate advanced levels of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, inclusion, mindfulness, empathy, social intelligence, and learning agility. These are foundational job skills that all employees need for career success.

My recent book,?Getting It Right When It Matters Most?(Gambill and Carbonara, 2021), introduces the SOAR Self-Leadership Model. This model takes the fewest, most important knowledge and skills from these essential concepts and places them into a person-centric, practical, replicable, and research-backed roadmap for effectively navigating complex situations that rely on strong relationships with others to succeed. The four phases of the model are Self, Outlook, Action, and Reflection (SOAR).?

The most successful people at work and in life share a pattern of foundational Self-Leadership behaviors upon which all their other actions are built. Developing advanced Self-Leadership skills has never been more important for career growth.

Leadership Skills For All Employees

Read the statements below and decide if they describe the attributes of a great leader or a great manager.

• They’re results-oriented while concurrently focused on developing every worker
• They intentionally give employees a voice in decision making
• They ensure people feel connected and know how their work contributes to the team and organization.
• They routinely make people feel valued and appreciated – even nurtured
• They’re deeply caring about the well-being of every person they lead

This list shows the attributes of great managers from the Gallup Organization's research on employee engagement. You will immediately notice how this list could equally apply to describing the attributes of great leaders. Now look at the list again, and you will see that it also describes many of the aspects employees need to demonstrate to thrive in their roles. That is the nature of today's work, and we need great leaders, managers, and employees for an organization to have long-term success.?

Conclusion

I understand that there are fundamental differences in complexity, scope, and context between the roles of a leader, manager, and individual contributors. I also appreciate differences in the skills and abilities needed for people to succeed in their respective roles. What is also very clear is that for organizations to succeed, leadership can't be limited to only those with leadership titles.

The message organizations need to send to their employees is that leadership is required at all levels for success in today’s world of work. This should dramatically change how employees look at developing their skill sets and how educational systems and organizations look at developing career skills.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:?Tony Gambill is the President of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping organizations, executives, and managers bring their best leadership selves to their most challenging situations. He is the author of,?Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life. You can also follow Tony on?Forbes?Leadership Strategy?to read his articles on Self-Leadership and Leading Others.