What skills would maximize your impact?

Based on your area of focus, what skills are the most important for the critical function of your role? Do you know what they are? Do you have them?

We’re going to explore how you can develop the skills you need to maximize your leadership impact at each level.

Be sure to check out last week’s issue for the critical function of each role: individual contributors, front-line leaders, and leaders of leaders.

Align and Develop

You need to align your development efforts with the critical skills required at each level of your organization. Let’s take a look at the critical new skills introduced at each level:

Individual Contributor (IC): Technical skills are the priority for individual contributors. Whether it’s hands-on production work, communication skills, or Microsoft product skills, ICs leverage the skills necessary to do high-quality production work.

Front-line Leader (FLL): Front-line leaders are the skill developers for most ICs. That means FLLs must develop their coaching & training skillset. There are many complementary areas you can explore, such as emotional intelligence or interviewing, but most efforts should be aimed at improving the capabilities of ICs. Developing skills in coaching, training, and developing others is more important for leadership performance than developing technical production skills.

Leader of Leaders (LOL): Advanced problem solving, creation of strategy, and the ability to define and uphold a department’s culture are a few of the critical tasks handled by leaders of leaders. Leaders of leaders must focus on critical thinking to optimize their talent, solve problems, innovate, and create an environment that fosters continuous success. Leaders of leaders should focus on enhancing their critical thinking skills to ensure they can solve novel problems in any area of their operation. Building sustained, predictable success requires a great deal of planning and critical thinking; this is when leaders move from firefighters to fire suppressors.

Reflection Questions

Learning how to speak a foreign language is fun and challenging, but it might not help you get promoted. We all know that, but most of us don’t know which skills are most valuable in our current role.

Take an inventory of your current role and identify the specific skills you need to drive success. Should you focus on coaching or developing a coaching strategy and framework for others to execute? Both of these tasks require a different set of core skills, and you must determine what skills you need for the work assigned to you.

Check out these reflection questions below to explore how you can maximize your value in your current role.

1. What is the best measure of success in my role?

2. What skills do I need to succeed in my role?

3. Do I possess these skills? What’s my current level of mastery?

   1. Do I have any significant weaknesses?

4. How can I develop new skills or enhance my existing ones?

   1. What resources can you use—think people, podcasts, books, articles, courses, etc—to begin building your skills in each identified area?

Taking a regular inventory of your skills and the gaps between what you possess and what your organization expects is necessary to continue making strides in your development and contributions to your organization.

Summary

Next week, we will look at problem-solving at each level. Sometimes we get down in the weeds and solve problems that we don’t need to. Next week’s issue will help you identify and solve the problems only you can solve at your leadership level!

Let me know if you have any questions about the leadership levels. I’ll be answering a select few in our Q&A issue coming up in 3 weeks!

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