The Leadership Skills Handbook

90 Essential Skills You Need to be a Leader

Jo Owen

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780749480332
• eBook ISBN: 9780749480349
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Winner of the CMI Management Book of the Year Awards in the 2012/2013 New Manager category, The Leadership Skills Handbook from best-selling author Jo Owen reveals the essential skills you need to be an effective leader. It shows you what works in practice, not in theory, in crucial areas such as people skills, career skills, mindset skills, organization skills, personal values and behaviours. Each skill is presented in a concise, easy to follow format, with an accompanying framework to help you deploy it in your own life. The skills are about the real challenges real leaders have to master, and as you observe and record real-life examples of skills in action, you will be developing your own unique formula for success in the context that matters to you. Based on research from over a thousand leaders throughout the world at all levels in the public, private and voluntary sectors, it identifies the practical skills to make you even more successful, and offers guidance on all key topics.

This completely revised fourth edition of The Leadership Skills Handbook includes brand new content on some of the most challenging skills that successful leaders need to master through three new sections on financial skills (including budgeting, costs, pricing and creating an investment case), political skills (including influencing, negotiating, networking and partnering) and the art of strategy (including strategic models, understanding the customer, marketing, pricing and advertising). This indispensable guidance will boost your confidence, technical abilities and give you the edge on your peers.

Part One

Mindset skills

1. 01 Positive leadership
2. 02 Responsibility
3. 03 High aspirations
4. 04 Have courage
5. 05 Be adaptable
6. 06 Learn to be lucky
7. 07 Managing stress
8. 08 Honesty
9. 09 Self-awareness
10. 10 Working to win

01

Positive leadership

Cynicism is in plentiful supply in the lower reaches of many organizations. There are many cynical junior and middle managers who are going to stay that way: cynical and junior. Our research found no effective leaders who were cynical about their work, their organization, themselves or their lives. They were relentlessly positive about everything.

Being positive is different from the hippy mantra of ‘Be happy; don’t worry.’ Positive leadership is a frame of mind where leaders:

• look to the future, not to the past;
• focus on action, not on analysis;
• see possibilities, not just problems;
• take control versus being controlled;
• create options versus accepting the status quo.

Some people behave like this naturally. For the rest of us, the good news is that these are habits that can be learnt. Choose which set of questions from Table 1.1 you want, in a tough situation, to be working on in your head. Keep asking yourself these questions and you will run a serious risk of appearing and acting like a positive and effective leader.

TABLE 1.1 Asking the right questions

Leader mindset	Follower mindset
What are some possible solutions/options/ways forward?	What went wrong?
What can I do now to regain control and build momentum?	Why have I been put in this position?
Whose support do I need and how will I get it?	Who messed up? Who is going to put this right?
What can I learn from this?	How do I avoid the blame?

In our research, we came across some outstanding examples of leaders thinking positively:

• An arsonist had burned down one wing of the school. The headteacher saw this as a great opportunity to redesign and rebuild the school in the way she wanted it to be, and the insurance company would pay. She was not, as far as we know, responsible for the arson attack.
• The Japanese subsidiary of a multinational was losing US $2 million a year and jobs were at risk. The leader of the subsidiary persuaded head office that it should invest US $2 million a year in building its Japanese subsidiary. Head office thought this was great. Losses (bad) were miraculously converted into investment (good) and everyone was happy.
• The politician was meeting voters, and always wanted to say something nice to them. One person came up and introduced himself as a pawnbroker: what can you say that is positive about that? ‘Wonderful... pawnbroking is where banking really started hundreds of years ago... and you are still the only people who provide banking services to the poor. You provide a very important and historic service.’ One more vote in the bag as the pawnbroker disappeared, happy, down the street.

Cynical junior and middle managers are going to stay that way: cynical and junior.

02

Responsibility

Responsibility is massively abused in management speak. Most people’s hearts sink when responsibility comes into the conversation: it is rarely a positive development.

It can be used as a guilt trip by senior managers on team members: ‘Remember you are responsible for the outcome of this project.’ It can be used as petty politics to define and defend territory: ‘This is my responsibility; if I need your help I will ask for it.’ It can be used by jobsworths to avoid responsibility: ‘I can’t do that: it’s not my responsibility. It’s more than my job’s worth to let you do that.’

So forget how the organization abuses the idea of responsibility, and focus on what it means for you as a leader. Here are three things that all leaders must be responsible for, and where many people struggle:

1. You are responsible for your career. If you have a lousy job with a lousy boss in a lousy organization, who is responsible for that? Only when you take responsibility for your own destiny can you start to control it. At times, your choices may be very uncomfortable, but you always have choices.
2. You are responsible for what happens to you, even the bad stuff. ‘I got ripped off first for £500,000, then for £5 million and finally for £50 million within five years. So I was making progress, of sorts: the disasters were at least getting bigger and more interesting. At first I blamed the people who ripped me off. Then I realized that if I was a victim, then I was only a victim of my own folly in letting myself be ripped off.’ Once you take responsibility, you take control and you start to make progress. Until that point you are a victim of a cruel world: leaders never let themselves become victims. They take control.
3. You are responsible for your own feelings. This is the killer, literally. Research shows that pessimists die sooner and have a lower quality of life than optimists. And if you want to feel angry, frustrated and upset with your colleagues, that is your choice: there is no law that says you must. And if you feel that way, the chances are your feelings will affect your colleagues and things will only get worse. Or you can feel calm, positive and actionfocused: your colleagues are likely to respond better. It takes time to retrain instinctive reactions and feelings, but it can be done. The starting point is to realize that how you feel is how you choose to feel: choose well.

All of this qualifies as a BFO: a Blinding Flash of the Obvious. But it is so obvious that it is very hard to see, especially in the heat of battle or in the slough of despond when emotions can overwhelm sense. As George Orwell wrote: ‘To see what is in front of your nose requires a constant struggle.’

If you can see this and act on it, you will not only lead better: you will live better and longer.

03

High aspirations

Low aspirations are self-fulfilling. People who believe they can, and people who believe they can not, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Mindset skills
• Part Two Career skills
• Part Three People skills
• Part Four Moment of truth skills
• Part Five Daily skills
• Part Six Organization skills
• Part Seven Political skills
• Part Eight Financial skills
• Part Nine The art of strategy
• Further reading
• Index
• Backcover