Leadership Skills

How to Take Your Leadership Skills to the Next Level

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leadership skills

Whether you work for someone else or run your own business, good leadership skills can have a very positive impact on your professional success. Great leaders have what it takes to guide their teams toward a common goal. Despite common belief, no one is born a natural leader. Anyone has the capacity to thrive in a leadership role with the right education! Check out the following resources from Keetria to take your leadership skills up a notch.

Get a Formal Education

While you don’t need a formal education to become a leader, pursuing a formal degree or diploma can prove invaluable.

  • Formal training will teach you tried and true leadership methods that you can employ in your own business.
  • Attending university is a fantastic opportunity to network with other leaders.
  • At school, you will learn how to think critically and take other perspectives — key traits of any effective leader.
  • Earning an online MBA degree is a great option for working professionals.

Learn on The Go

If you’re short on time, find creative ways to fit learning into your day! Audiobooks and podcasts are great for learning on the go.

  • Listen to podcasts while cooking dinner or cleaning the house.
  • Play an audiobook during your daily commute.
  • Read e-books while waiting for appointments.
  • Find ways to learn on the job.

Improve Your Communication Skills

Communication plays a key role in leadership. If you’re looking to improve your leadership skills, try learning how to be a better communicator.

Learning how to be a good leader won’t happen overnight. Every day, dedicate some time towards learning and practicing the skills that will help you succeed.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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The 4 Tips for Communicating Effectively with Employees as a Leader

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4 Tips for Communicating Effectively with Employees as a Leader
When you’re part of a business team, whether you’re the company owner or the newest intern, you have to utilize your communication skills every day. This can include simple conversation or harder communication concepts like expressing something that you want in the best way.

When you’re a leader, the need to communicate effectively increases astronomically. Communication is what keeps the cogs turning in your business, and you’re the one who gives the commands and orders to keep everything running. However, there’s definitely a difference between barking out orders and effectively communicating a task, especially when it comes to employee retention and execution.

Effective communication is about getting across what you want to get across while simultaneously having an open and safe atmosphere for conversation. If you want to better hone your own communication skills as a leader, try out these tips.

  1. Keep communication vocabulary simple and streamlined.

In the workplace, there is a lot of different technical language floating around, but not everyone has the same dictionary in their brain to understand this terminology. For instance, a new intern may not quite grasp the same marketing terms as a professional marketer you’ve had on board for two years.

Thus, keep your directions clear and simplified as much as possible. This isn’t intended to insult the intelligence of your employees, but instead puts a focus on maintaining a common communication bridge.

  1. Use visual cues and stations to illustrate big pictures.

It’s one thing to send out a business-wide email about a certain point you want to get across, but emails are easy to send to the trash or leave unread. While you should still use email as a method of communicating with your team as a whole, it’s also great to go a step further.

Use whiteboards as a visual representation of a big idea you’re trying to get across. Place them around work stations and write your biggest point on them in bright colors. This keeps the message in your employee’s minds all day.

  1. Insert humor where possible.

Here’s something some SMB owners forget: your employees are humans, not automatons. A boss’ idea on this statement is very obvious in how they speak to their employees. When you speak to your employees like robots, they don’t feel like they’re appreciated or human in your eyes.

Talk to your employees like people, and show that you recognize this through humor. Show that you’re all people who have a funny bone and it’s okay to joke around a little in order to get your point across.

  1. Always encourage employee feedback.

One of the ways you may not be effectively communicating is by only giving and not taking. Communication is a two way street by definition. If you aren’t leaving room for feedback, you aren’t actually communicating.

Whenever you allow your employees to give thoughts of their own to the conversation, they feel appreciated. You also may find out that your employees have an insight into something that helps you out more than you realize.

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6 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Master the Skill of Leadership

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There are a lot of traits every entrepreneur must have to be successful. Productive, confident, critical and innovative. All of these character traits make an entrepreneur who they are – a strong businessperson who knows what they’re doing and exudes that quality to everyone they know.

But what if you’re an entrepreneur who isn’t exactly a leader? Not all entrepreneurs automatically come equipped with a strong knack for leadership. This is something fixable, though. Keep these six methods in mind in order to start better honing your leader skills.


Always be willing to listen.

One of the greatest skills an entrepreneur can master is learning to listen. In a boss role, it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get into a “my way or the highway” mentality. Break this habit and hold regular employee, staff and/or team meetings.

When you learn what sort of input those beneath you in the ranks have to give, this helps you in two ways. One, you’ll learn about the inner workings of your business. Two, your employees will respect you more because you’re willing to put them on the same plane as you.

 

Get on top of your deadlines.

There’s no such thing as a good leader who’s late. It’s not uncommon for office workers to push deadlines or forget an assignment – it’s not a good thing, but it’s certainly not uncommon. Leaders, however, have an example to set. When they miss their deadlines, they show that they aren’t organized or serious about success.

When you fix both of these problems, you show that you’re a good leader because you’re willing to go the extra mile to make sure things get done. Conquer your deadlines and become the leader you want to be.

 

Communicate constantly.

Good leaders communicate all the time – whether it’s to their team or their partners, they constantly have to be talking about their ideas, their plans and making sure everyone in their business is on the same page.

Just like you need to be able to listen, you have to be able to speak about the things you think, know and hear as an entrepreneur. When you master this skill, you show you have what it takes to lead.

 

Hone your cooperation and personal skills.

With all this listening and talking going on within your business, you should have developed some good interpersonal skills. However, there have been many leaders who know how to listen and communicate, but they don’t know to actually make connections with people.

A good leader is someone who knows how to cooperate with others, is a personable boss and colleague, and they also have a knack for connecting with others as a person, not just a business associate.

 

Learn to come second.

You won’t be coming in first every time. As a leader, sometimes your needs aren’t what need to be met at the moment. If you need to take a pay cut in order to pay your employees, so be it. Good leaders are people who understand that they might be the boss, but employees come first.

 

Have a way with words.

Consider a good leader. They’re confident, right? This confidence comes through in how they speak with people – both in personal and business settings.

Confidence isn’t just about thinking you’re great. It’s about being able to speak to others in any situation and show that you don’t just think you’re great – you ARE great, and it shows.

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