INTRODUCTION
There is much that is written about “Leadership”. There are many skills to learn about how to enhance one’s leadership.
In some organisations, there is more focus on the importance of a strong “technical” set of skills that are relevant to specific vocations to ensure that there is hard-skills competence to derive solutions, innovation, strategies, etc. However, Leaders and Individual contributors do not work in isolation (in my view, individuals are also leaders and they have to “lead” themselves in their own areas of work). There is also a critical need for all individuals and teams to work cohesively to derive a synergistic outcome. For this reason, it is essential for leaders to put emphasis on the knowledge and skills to work with individuals who are their peers, subordinates and supervisors. This is a common knowledge, a given. However, from my experience in coaching leaders, I seem to get a perspective that there is much focus on getting things done than on how to work effectively with other individuals, and for those who acknowledge the importance of the need to interact well, they sometimes struggle with the how to.
In my opinion, there are two very important sets of soft skills that individuals and leaders need, to enhance their personal effectiveness; they are intra-personal and interpersonal skills. In many job postings (regardless of level of seniority) we frequently see the ubiquitous requirement of “good interpersonal skills”.
Intra-personal skills - are the foundation of effective leadership and personal growth. These skills refer to the ability to understand and manage one's own thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. Leaders who possess strong intra-personal skills are better equipped to navigate challenging situations, build strong relationships with team members, and drive organizational success.
Inter-personal skills - also known as people skills or social skills, are essential abilities that enable individuals to effectively interact, communicate, and collaborate with others in various personal and professional settings. These skills play a fundamental role in establishing and maintaining healthy relationships, fostering teamwork, resolving conflicts, and achieving success in numerous aspects of life.
SELF-AWARENESS
From experience, one option to consider before seeking out training programs and workshops to acquire all the “knowledge” in intra-personal and interpersonal skills, it is essential to have a strong understanding, awareness of one’s own natural interpersonal mind-set. The rational for this is that, one can assimilate all the relevant skills and concepts available, however, the power is not in the knowledge, but in the practice, the acting out the execution.
From our experience from workshops that we have conducted, majority of individuals are able to grasp the concepts and processes, however, they encounter the difficulty of “how” to perform, communicate, effect and derive the desired impact. Many participants (and leaders) have commented that they have “carried out the process as suggested or discussed”, but the results did not manifest positively during practice. One of the key factors that was mentioned was that they feel unnatural, the process is not intuitive, or they felt self-conscious during execution. From my observations, I deduce that a key impacting factor is the natural/preferred personality profile of the respective individuals (every individual is different).
This leads me to the premise that is it very important and essential for leaders and individuals to have a good grasp of their personal profile. It would be helpful to first achieve a significant level of self-awareness first before they attend any training, or attempt to practice skills learnt. Knowing more about one’s profile will help provide a better understanding of the level of ease or challenge when practicing interpersonal skills (everyone’s different).
A good source of information about one’s own personality can come from psychometric assessments. By selecting the appropriate assessments, one can get a good reference about one’s personality in the areas of behaviour, cognitive capacity, emotions, potential and more.
The data from profiling can help provide guidance on how one’s natural affinity to various of aspects of work and the necessary level of interaction. Below are some of the contrasting preferences that individuals may have about the nature of work and the type of work environment they thrive in :
Preferring a structured work environment with clarity of instructions, processes, routines and policies vs an environment that is a start-up where in the latter, direction and instructions can be ambiguous at the best of times, and work involves the morphing of the business into something that is new and different.
There are individuals who are motivated by frequent interaction with people (selling, educating, marketing, etc) whilst there are others who prefer to be individual contributors or to work with equipment or do research work
Some individuals are motivated by a fast moving environment with frequent changes, tight-time lines and needing to adapt, and learn new things. There are others who prefer to have a more regular and planned environment where things are generally scheduled, planned and with little or no disruptions.
By having a better understanding of one’s personal preferences and profile, individuals will be in a better position to then understand where their natural preferences and abilities are ,and also what may be less intuitive to them. With this awareness, it will be possible to then identify what skills will be easily adopted and applied more effectively and what skills may take longer and need more practice before gaining an acceptable level of proficiency. In this way, being self-aware will pave the way to more effective practice/implementation of intra-personal, inter-personal skills and majority of behavioural skills.
Comments