8 Four Basic Leadership Skills

Leadership Skills

Let’s begin with some foundational skills that you can practice regardless of your role, and that probably include skills you already possess intuitively.

Skill #1: Influence

To influence is to have the ability to effect change in someone. Choosing to use a particular influential approach helps you communicate your vision or goals, organize people, and build commitment from stakeholders. At a basic level, influence is getting someone to do what you want them to do. But genuine commitment from other people is often required for you to accomplish more complex tasks, hence there are a variety of strategies for influencing people. Ultimately, influence is a tool that helps you to get things done and achieve outcomes you want or have to make happen.

Influencers can force and compel using coercion, or can more subtly influence through trust, emotion, and logic. When a leader needs action and compliance is critical, obligation through a mandate is required. When there is resistance or unwillingness to comply, coercion is the influential approach that may be chosen. These are often found in employee handbooks, contracts, and job descriptions.

For example:

• When the fire alarm goes off all staff are to assist children as they exit the building, regardless of the lunch and break schedule.
• Employees who are late (more than 15 minutes past the start of their shift) more than three times without notifying the director will be terminated.

When choosing to use influence it is critical to know your stakeholders. Each person has special concerns and issues, so various groups and individuals will require different approaches for influencing. Early in your career, influence is about working effectively with people over whom you have no authority. It requires the ability to present logical and compelling arguments and engage in give-and-take communication. In more positions of authority influence is focused more on steering long-range objectives, inspiration, and motivation in the people you manage.

influential Skills to Practice

Logic

• Logic appeals to people’s rational and reasonable thinking. You present an argument for the best choice of action based on organizational benefits, personal benefits, or both, appealing to people’s minds and reasoning.
• Example: At the staff meeting Bus Driver Ann points out that she is almost always on time, and if a staff member was at the curb when she pulls up, it would save time unloading children from the bus, and afternoon snacks would not run late every day, causing the break schedule to back up.

Emotions

• Emotion connects an idea or a message to an individual’s goals and values. An idea that promotes a person’s feelings of well-being, service, or sense of belonging tugs at the heart and can garner support.
• Example: At the staff meeting Bus Driver Ann points out that she is almost always on time, and if a staff member was at the curb when she pulls up, it would save time unloading children from the bus, and afternoon snacks would not run late every day, causing the break schedule to back up.

Cooperation

• A cooperative or collaborative appeal can create a feeling of teamwork, a sense that alliances are being built and stakeholders are not alone. Offering strategies for working together to accomplish a mutually important goal extends a hand to others in the organization and is an extremely effective way of influencing others.
• Example: At the staff meeting Teacher Assistant Joel points out that if all three staff assist in clean-up for 15 minutes after the last child leaves, everyone will be able to leave on time. Staff Heather and Dawn are on board, as they often have to stay late waiting for clean up to finish. They are happy to help in order to leave on time.

Pause to Reflect

Which of these three feels natural to you? Can you think of a time you were an unintentional influencer?

Can you think of a situation in which you could choose an appropriate and intentional influential tactic and use your influence as a leader?

As you match influential skills to situations you wish to improve you are building the next level of influencing skills.

Advanced Influencing Skills

Organizational Intelligence

When you practice a variety of influential skills, learning more about the people around you, what they care about, what bothers them, and how they prefer to communicate, you will begin to understand how to get things done and work with the reality of your organizations individuals and quirks in order to lead effectively.

Example: The Blue classroom team likes to do lesson planning together, so the schedule is arranged for them to have some time each week together. The Yellow classroom team likes their lead to do all the planning, so they provide him with a few extra hours once a week while they stay in the classroom. Director Ann allows for the teams to organize differently even though it makes more work for her.

Serving Authentically

Through the intentional actions you choose as you practice leading, you will find what best matches who you are authentically. Your “youness” will be noticed, and you will credibly promote yourself—while also promoting what’s good for the entire organization.

Example: Director Heather notices that Teacher Assistant Jeremy (an extroverted young college student) is always making suggestions that the team likes, and in fact they have begun asking him his opinion. She wonders if he would like to move into a lead teacher role.

Building Trust

Leadership involves guiding and helping people through risk and change. Trust is essential to this guidance. All the leadership skills discussed here have the potential to build trust, and the wise leaders look to trust as foundational to success.

Example: A new assistant joins the Green classroom team, and Lead Teacher Jim organizes a welcome lunch for her, so that all can begin to form relationships.

Building and Maintaining Networks

No leader is truly acting alone. Leaders are empowered by their connections with others and look for others to connect with. As you recognize the support and collaboration others provide to you, and you build trust and understanding, you and those around you will feel satisfied. Networks of people with shared ideas and goals get things done!

Example: Family Home provider Mandy organizes with her assistants and two regular parent volunteers a few days in which they all receive some professional development paid for by her business—they have asked to learn more about lesson planning, and so she organizes the time for them to attend and provides a nice lunch for them.

Skill #2: learning Agility or Being Nimble

Being agile or nimble means to be able to move quickly, to have flexibility, and to pivot when needed. When you are agile in your learning, you choose to seek out the lessons of experience, remember those lessons, and value them in your growth as a leader. This calls for recognizing when new behaviours, leadership skills, or attitudes are needed and accepting responsibility for developing them. Learning agility involves learning from mistakes, asking insightful questions, and being open to feedback. It includes taking advantage of opportunities to learn, and responding with as much intentionality as possible to new situations. For leaders, learning agility is also about inspiring learning in others and creating a culture of learning throughout the organization – modeling for the leaders you are growing. A key word for this skill is accountability.

In early care and education, stakeholders are often asked to behave in an authoritative approach that requires significant learning agility. Regardless of your role, to be the authority is to take the lead, make a final decision, take command, act as an authority figure in a situation. Authority figures are perceived as powerful, regardless of the accuracy of their knowledge. Most structures that involve people (businesses/institutions) have structures of authority, in which some people manage or have authority over other people.

In early care and education, adults are perceived as the authority figures by children. Often teachers are perceived by parents as authority figures. Authority and power are closely linked, with authority figures granted power by systems or by other people. All stakeholders have the choice to act with authority, and behaving with authority is a choice.

Choices to consider as you learn who you are as a leader include:

1. Seek out new and different experiences. Remain open minded and broaden your perspective, even when you feel vulnerable.
2. Accept and welcome challenges or the unfamiliar. Find the willingness to move out of your comfort zone. Dig deep and allow these experiences to change you!
3. Reflect and internalize these new experiences. When you take the time to truly internalize you are then able to recall and share later.  Process your learning so next steps become evident.
4. Be open to criticism and create a strategy for taking in feedback from others and being accountable when needed. View feedback as a gift of learning. You may not like it, and it may be uncomfortable, but there is value in it for you nonetheless.
5. Move on! Many of us feel the need to get things done quickly, and feel the pressure to act, causing us to over think at times, or hesitate. It’s ok to be creative! You can use accountability later if something doesn’t work out.

Skill #3: Communication

Communication is one of the most basic  leadership skills all of us need to develop and refine during our professional careers. Communication is consistently rated among the most important skills for leaders to be successful. Communication is also embedded in a number of other leadership skills and behaviours,

Communication begins with practicing the art of active listening. The active listening skill set involves these 6 active listening skills:

Pay attention: When you are talking with a colleague formally, or even informally, don’t cut others off, appear distracted, finish their sentences, or start formulating your answer before they’ve finished speaking. Pay attention to your body language as well as your frame of mind when engaging in listening. Be focused on the moment, and behave from a place of respect as the listener. Set a comfortable tone that gives your colleague an opportunity to think and speak. Allow “wait time” before responding. If you can’t be attentive, be up front and set up another time to meet.

Withhold judgment: Active listening requires an open mind and lack of prejudice. As a listener and a leader, be open to new ideas, new perspectives, and new possibilities when practicing active listening. Even when good listeners have strong views, they consciously suspend judgment, reserve criticisms, and avoid arguing or articulating their point right away. This takes practice!

Reflect: When you’re the listener, don’t assume that you understand your colleague correctly — and don’t assume that they are aware that you are actively listening. Mirror your colleagues’ information and emotions by periodically repeating key points to assure them that you are paying attention. Reflecting is an active listening technique that indicates to your colleague that you are not only paying attention but understanding their points.

Clarify: Do not hesitate to ask questions about any issue or statement that is confusing or unclear when engaging in active listening. As the listener, if you have doubt or confusion about what your colleague has said, say something like, “Let me see if I’m clear. Are you talking about …?” or “Wait a minute. I didn’t follow you.” Open-ended, clarifying, and probing questions are important active listening tools that encourage the person to do the work of self-reflection and problem solving, rather than justifying or defending a position, or trying to guess the “right answer.” Examples include: “What do you think about …?” or “Tell me about …?” and “Will you further explain/describe …?” When engaging in active listening, the emphasis is on asking rather than telling. It invites a thoughtful response and maintains a spirit of collaboration during the interaction.

Summarize: Restating key points or ideas as the conversation proceeds confirms your grasp of the other person’s point of view. It also helps both parties to be clear on understanding and perhaps next steps. Briefly summarize what you have understood while practicing active listening, and ask the other person to do the same, especially when strong feelings are involved.

Share: Active listening is first about understanding the other person, then about being understood as the listener. As you gain a clearer understanding of the other person’s perspective or problem, you can consider when to introduce your ideas, feelings, or even suggestions. You might talk about a similar experience you had or share an idea that was triggered by a comment made in the conversation. Depending on the situation this may help the conversation to shift into problem solving. As the listener, continue to question, guide, and offer, but be careful about solving problems before allowing colleagues the opportunity to be problem solvers themselves.

Active listening is one of many communication skills you can practice as you choose to pursue your own growth as a leader. You want to think with clarity, express ideas, and share information with a multitude of stakeholders. You can choose to learn how to handle the rapid flows of information in your workplace, and among all the stakeholders you work with. Effective communication and effective leadership are closely braided together. Leaders need to be skilled communicators in a variety of relationships at many levels, especially in early care and education.

Skill #4: Self-Awareness

Self-awareness means understanding your strengths and weaknesses, along with a willingness to consider your mental models, biases, and triggers. As we discussed earlier, gaining self-awareness is anything but simple, and change can be hard to implement. Your ability to be self-aware is one of the critical leadership skills for sustainable and long-term effectiveness as a leader. Self-awareness is a challenging skill to develop, and it serves as the foundation to many other skills we have discussed.

Your effectiveness as a leader is less impactful or more impactful based on how well you understand yourself, your awareness of how others view you, and how you choose to navigate the resulting interactions between you and your colleagues. Here are basic behaviours you can implement as you focus on your awareness of yourself.

• Your Own Wisdom. There are insights from your experience that you can apply to the challenges you face with others. You bring your life experience and your learnings from others in your life to every situation. Insights from your life won’t come to mind immediately, but as you practice reflecting on how you are going to choose to lead, and what has been productive (or not) in the past you find that your own wisdom will help you. This requires practicing deep reflection as part of your self awareness – looking for bias, mental models, and assumptions.
• Your Professional Identity. This is about who you are in your current professional setting. Just as you have a personal identity, you can develop a professional identity that demonstrates leadership. Your professional identity influences how you are leading whether you’re aware of it or not. In our diverse world it’s critical to understand our own identity and how it shapes interactions with others. Knowing your own professional identity may help you find common ground with others that leads to stronger relationships.
• Your Professional Reputation. This is how others perceive you as a leader and professional based on your current and previous behaviour. Your professional reputation is what others think of you as a colleague, a leader, a stakeholder. Understanding your reputation helps you comprehend how you may be perceived and judged by others. Knowing how you’re perceived is sometimes difficult and requires trying to see yourself through other lenses. You can choose to change your current behaviour, and you can influence how you would like others to think of you if you choose to change. This will take self-awareness, and trusted mentors.
• Leadership Potential. How do people know the leadership skills and behaviours you’re capable of, and how do you communicate your potential? What aspirational set of leadership skills and behaviours do you want colleagues to see in and from you? Defining how you’d like to be perceived allows you to choose what to work on, and where to start. Strong leadership skills can only be developed if you’re self-aware, willing to consider your leadership reputation, define your professional identity, and be reflective. For those who work at it, greater self-awareness will pay off no matter what your role.

Attribution

Leadership: An Introduction to Leadership Skills in Early Childhood Care and Education in Leadership in Early Care and Education by Tammy Marino; Maidie Rosengarden; Sally Gunyon; and Tanya Noland published Open Oregon by under a CC BY-NC-SA license

Four leadership skills content draws on ideas contained in: Center for Creative Leadership. (2020). The Core Leadership Skills you Need in Every Role.  https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/fundamental-4-core-leadership-skills-for-every-career-stage/