Hone Your Power Skills to Be a More Effective Leader - Part Two
/Part one of this two part series on honing your power skills focused on empowering you to navigate your stressors and practice self-regulation. Now, we’re ready to dive into power skills, focusing on three of the most effective.
Your Skills Aren’t “Soft”
Have you noticed that almost every organization, big and small, within each and every industry has a preference – and even a demand, for – what have been dubbed “Soft Skills”? In job descriptions and performance reviews they can show up with phrases like:
Excellent Communication
Emotional Intelligence
Empathetic
Strategic
Motivating
Visionary
Authentic
But soft skills? Is that really what the most in demand skills should be called? This concept is in desperate need of a rebrand. I’m not alone in using a new term, but it is still quite new, so if you haven’t been introduced to the rebrand – Soft Skills are out and Power Skills are in.
3 Key Power Skills
I’m going to be drawing on literature and vocabulary from the Leadership Circle Profile which is a 360 degree leadership assessment tool. I am certified by The Leadership Circle® and use it in leadership coaching because the literature is data-backed with more than one million participants with the data remaining steady. This data is compelling, revealing that leaders with certain skills perform better on key performance indicators like profit, innovation and sustainability.
The Leadership Circle has 18 power skills, or what they call “Creative Competencies”. I’m highlighting three of them as power skills for a couple reasons:
The desire to grow in these areas come up multiple times a day in my coaching work with leaders. They’ve either self-identified these areas for growth or they’ve received feedback on these areas.
Elements of these three are often used in organizations to assess performance of leaders, formally or informally.
Not every description is going to resonate with you and there is also a chance that not every aspect will be relevant to your context – both work context, and also the complexities that we have in our personal lives. I invite you to adapt my words to fit your own experience, take what matters most for you and leave the rest behind.
Power Skill #1: Self-Awareness
This is how you cope with life’s challenges and how you are able to keep a degree of work/life balance, including time for business, play, reflection and relaxation. This can be tough to do. Honing the power skill of Self-Awareness enables you to:
Make time to reflect and create opportunities to rest and renew yourself
Maintain a healthy outlook on the whole of your life (both personal and professional)
Take care of you mind, body and spirit with healthy habits
Persevere in ways that don’t cause you physical or mental harm, especially when things are hectic
Behave maturely
Power Skill #2: Courage
This is how you show up in the face of adversity, maintaining your position when it’s hard to do, engaging in challenging conversations and showing your vulnerability as a human being. Honing your Courage empowers you to:
Share and discuss your thoughts and feelings
Face challenges head on, clearly and honestly
Speak up about your position on tough issues
Address conflict genuinely and compassionately in your approach and tone
Let others know how you feel fairly and constructively
Take accountability for your mistakes
Power Skill #3: Relating
This is how you connect with other people, individually and in groups and empower them to be their best. Honing your Relating improves your ability to:
Establish safety, trust and respect
Motivate others to contribute
Demonstrate a positive outlook and communication skills
Deal with roadblocks efficiently and effectively
Sharing authentically with higher-ups
Actively listening to what each person has to contribute, regardless of their level in the organization
Embracing coaching, mentorship and sponsorship to engage and inspire others to be their best
All of these three power skills create psychologically safe environments.
Strengths to Build On
In looking at these three power skills, what capabilities do you demonstrate consistently? Which one(s) did you identify as your greatest strength(s)? Hopefully at least one – or perhaps a handful – stood out to you as areas where you have developed strengths.
Opportunities to Improve
What development opportunities spoke to you as a leader? (I chose my words carefully here because it’s important to reflect inwards, on what we might want to develop within ourselves). Take a moment to consider behaviours you think would serve you most in your current context. This could be the level of management you are working at, and it could also be considering the priorities you have on your plate and what additional learning you have capacity to take on.
Reflect with Mind and Body
What do you notice in your body at the thought of learning something new or deepening your ability in a certain way? Does it feel scary? Too scary? Or is the feeling you’re having the nervous energy you feel when you’re excited to try something challenging? Whatever it is, write it down.
Let’s check in to how your body is feeling around developing a new skill – is it possible that it’s sending stress signals? How accurate do you believe them to be? What might help your body feel more calm and safe in order to reflect more clearly? (Hint: You can use the breathing and movement exercises we explored earlier as you navigate this stress.)
The process we went through together is built on self reflection. By engaging with the discomfort of stressors and then being curious about both your strengths and opportunities, you were exercising your power skill of self-awareness. And you can use this skill to cultivate the other two power skills we’re focusing on.
Honing Your Power Skills
The tried and true way to increase your power skills is to integrate two activities:
Practice the behaviour you want to increase at every opportunity you have in your life.
Integrate self-reflection as a regular part of your routine.
If you are noticing stressors are blocking you from cultivating a power skill that is important to you, you can focus on reducing stressors by practicing self-reflection along with healthy activities like movement that you know help reduce stress levels in your body. Every time you practice, you are teaching your body and mind to navigate stress with greater ease. As your body and mind come more into a balanced and centred space, you will be able to harness more and more of your power skills by activating the behaviours you demonstrate regularly.
Continue Learning
Expanding your knowledge through books, podcasts, articles, and videos can be additionally supportive to building your power skills – with a couple of caveats. If you only consume this information, but neglect to practice integrating the skills you are learning about, you won’t get so far. I’d invite you to read or listen and then practice reflection around what you are learning, to shift more easily into power skill behaviours. For some of you, self reflection and reading and practices will be ample. And for others, mentorship and management in your organization will be an additional support.
Developing with a Leadership Coach
You may find that doing this solo might not be as impactful as you wish it to be. A leadership coach can help. Often, it helps to have another party who can help hold accountability for the learnings and for the challenges that come up while we’re trying to learn something new and help accelerate your learnings. A coach can also serve as a confidential, external, objective neutral third party that can create a safer and more generative learning environment to build power skills and navigate the VUCA.
No matter where you are on your leadership journey, I hope you will take a moment to celebrate the time you have spent learning from this series. Even the smallest reflection can create some distance from the self-limiting impacts of stress and move us toward increasing our leadership effectiveness.
