When Isabel, my older daughter, finished 3rd grade, she was recognized by her teacher for her leadership potential. Mr. Lee, her head teacher, advised us to nurture her leadership skills – allow her to make her own decisions, encourage her to volunteer and lead activities, let her explore new ideas. I remember being both impressed by his comments and proud of Isabel.
I grew up in China where top grades and ranking #1 were the only focal point of my elementary and junior high education. I didn’t really hear about leadership skills until I was in high school in the U. S. I was told then in high school to get into a top college, I must demonstrate leadership skills. I only knew the tactic meaning of it – Leadership skills was about showing I was well rounded and had experience leading diverse non-classroom activities. So I was a good Chinese student and did exactly that.
- I was a dancer and choreographer at our school’s dance production,
- I was a volunteer lead counselor at a community camp
- I was a co-chair of 1 or 2 school clubs, etc..
Luckily I got into Stanford and developed some leadership skills by accident, but believe me I had no idea what leadership skills was until my 30s. This is part of the reason I write this blog, so you can learn it earlier than I did. 🙂
You are never too young or too old to learn and develop leadership skills. If you want to develop leadership skill, start by understanding why they are so important to your career advancement. Here to help me explain is my fellow Executive Author, Jaime Lapena.
Below is a 10 min candid conversation between Jaime and I about the importance of leadership skills at any level of an organization. We look forward to your questions and comments about this topic. Also let us know how you like this audio + transcription format.
Audio Transcription
Lei: Okay Jaime, thank you for joining me today. I’d love to talk to you about how can we help others develop leadership skills? And we’ll keep this pretty informal, but I would love to kind of follow a particular rhythm in how we talk about it.
So I want to start following the pattern of talking about WHY a certain skill is important…WHAT that skill means. And then HOW could someone develop that skill if they wanted to. So in today’s session around leadership skills, let’s start talking about from your experience, from my experience…why do we think leadership skills are important?
Jaime: I mean that’s a good question and I think it’s a very broad question, with various flavors of answers that can be given. For me, and I think it will be unique to each person, but for myself just from over the years, what I’ve seen is good leadership can drive a company, help the company grow and the people grow with the company.
I think it’s important for a good leader to inspire and not just make people perspire, right? I think vision is a very big thing that leadership needs to be able to dial in with the people and give them direction at a high level.
Lei: I think also leadership skill is something that…I think we’re asking folks to develop at a very early age already, even if you’re talking about applying to college. Top colleges like Harvard or Princeton or Stanford are all looking for leadership skills already. Why? Because they’re trying to develop the future leaders of the world and they want to be the ones that are helping groom those leaders.
Jaime: Yeah, I mean that’s a good point and I think it’s not, you know, schools like that, they don’t develop workers…they develop leaders.
Lei: Right.
Jaime: And they develop a network of leaders.
Lei: Yeah. So in my mind, leadership skills are not only important when you’re in the leadership position. It’s actually already important at a young age, as early as you can develop leadership skills; it’s good for your career.
It’s good to sell yourself, starting with college, but also to your first job, to your future any jobs. And leadership skills is something that…I kind of, I’ve heard this definition before, it’s about leading yourself before leading the team and then leading the business.
Jaime: Yeah, the way that I look at it is leadership goes beyond working skills, right? I think leadership is something of a person’s personality and it becomes a part of their personality. I think leadership skills can be specifically for work or to accomplish whatever you want to accomplish, if that makes sense.
Because I think…I don’t think one can live without the other. Meaning I don’t think you can build on leadership skills if you don’t have that leadership in your, as a part of your personality or your quality, because those are values and principles that you follow, in my opinion. And the values you have are going to transmit to the people you want to influence.
Lei: So, let’s say in summary, if there were a couple of reasons why professionals should and develop their leadership skills, what would do you say are the top three reasons why?
Jaime: It’s interesting. I think leadership skills, and it’s a good question, but I think, and this is something that I didn’t realize early on in my career…is that… leadership is not just about managing people under you.
Like leadership is also communicating upwards well and understanding the importance of doing that. Because that also, I believe, being able to manage upwards well, even if you’re at the top rung of the ladder, will be able to…there will always be, as long as you’re working, there will always be one more person above you.
Lei: Yeah, even the CEO has customers and stake holders as…
Jaime: Well he has the board.
Lei: Yeah that’s people that he needs to manage and…
Jaime: Correct, correct. And that to me, if you can manage upwards and show that leadership, that’s definitely some skillsets and qualities that are rare, in my opinion. I mean the people that can do it right…I’ve often heard that Meg Whitman was a good…
Lei: Leader?
Jaime: CEO that could manage the board very well. It’s those types of things, right? I mean it’s not a wonder she became what she became. So I think there’s a lot of value and one of the big reasons why is if you’re going to steer a company into success, you need to influence people, both downwards and upwards. And horizontally, every which way.
Lei: Yep. But I think also it doesn’t…you don’t necessarily just need to think about leadership skills when you’re at that senior level.
Jaime: Definitely not.
Lei: Some of the reasons for developing leadership skills…I think there are three reasons. One…
Jaime: I think it should be as early as possible.
Lei: As early as possible, right. One is it gives you control over your own career because when you lead yourself, what that means to me is you’re being proactive about where you’re going, how you’re managing your job and other’s perceptions of your job. The more you are leading yourself; you can have the freedom and control to like manage your own career.
I think the second thing that’s great about leadership is that it is a skill where you initiate new ideas and you create something or contribute something new to the world. So making an impact into the world absolutely require leadership skills because somebody has to be the first to say something that says, “Hey, let’s do this.” And that ability to say those things and have a group of people work together to achieve something is how we contribute to the world.
I think lastly, leading…it isn’t about the title. I think I read the quote that “A manager has the title…or a boss has the title, but a leader has the people.” Because you can lead and you may be an individual contributor. But if you have a good idea and you want to facilitate excitement, there’s a lot of rewards in doing that, just on its own where you can inspire a group of people to believe what you believe.
You can inspire your manager to believe in your skills. You can inspire a co-worker to help you on a side project. So it can make your work life a lot more meaningful overall. And so for me, I think leadership skills is one of those, like you said, the earliest you can develop the better.
And it’s almost something very hard, I would say, that’s not exactly taught in (muffled) but every single school looks for it in its candidacy and always is one of the key things they say they want to develop.
Jaime: Yeah, I’d say I completely agree with those three and I’d say the fourth is leadership by example influences people.
Lei: Absolutely.
Jaime: And I think that’s part of where the values and the principals of that one of the individual come out. Because by example it will just by nature be seen by people, if that makes sense.
Lei: Yep, yep.
Jaime: I completely agree in that I don’t think they teach it in schools and even at work they won’t teach that because I believe it’s a different purpose. They’re weeding out who will be the leader, meaning like who actually…the cream rises the crop…I mean to the top.
Lei: Based on what you demonstrate.
Jaime: Exactly.
Lei: It’s a little bit of results oriented versus…
Jaime: Correct. So then the question now becomes, “Well, if I don’t know it and I don’t attend these top schools”, not that those top schools mean…and actually those top schools don’t teach you leadership in a way, they actually have culled all the applicants to see who would be the most qualified.
Lei: Who already had those qualities?
Jaime: Correct, fitting a persona. So what happens to the millions of other people who are attending not those top schools, like myself? We’re seen as workers and the thing is you have to learn how to be a leader.
Lei: How to demonstrate that you’ve got leadership.
Jaime: The challenge is you don’t necessarily know what that actually means. Like I didn’t know what that meant at all and quite frankly I’m still learning it.