In many organizations, leadership paradigms are changing and evolving. Modern leaders are expected to be empowering, understanding, inclusive, empathetic, compassionate, good listeners, able to manage and resolve conflict fairly, and to give more than they receive. That’s not always easy when you’re bombarded daily with your own demands, pressures and challenges.
Growing as a leader, and finding balance between your personal needs and your team’s needs, is a process that begins within you first. We can only give to others what we ourselves possess, and only when we feel secure enough that giving feels comfortable. Only then can you truly live and embody the values that create productive change and motivation in others.
Modern leaders aren’t just people in positions of power and authority, either. We can all be everyday leaders in our lives, even for something as simple and beautiful as leading a small child to take their first steps.
Leadership comes down to how effective we are at fighting for others, while also fighting to maintain balance in our own lives. That’s why it’s critical for leaders to become skilled at managing conflict and the many “shades of fighting” that affect people’s lives and relationships. Working on your internal foundation gives you a rock-solid base from which to grow into a highly effective leader.
What are modern leadership skills?
Modern leadership skills are interpersonal and self-management skills: empathy, compassion, listening, inclusion, and the ability to manage conflict productively rather than through authority alone. They are built from the inside out, in five steps: know your purpose, understand human nature, shift your perspective on conflict and fighting, develop your personal strengths, and continually experiment, iterate and reflect.
Step 1: know your purpose
A clear understanding of your purpose guides your decisions, actions and motivations. Leading without knowing your true purpose is like sailing without a compass and without a destination. You might get where you want to go eventually, but you might not. A clear purpose keeps your actions aligned with your deeper needs and intent, which strengthens character, integrity, focus and fulfillment.
People aren’t as aware of their purpose as you’d think they should be, and there are good reasons for this. Purpose is tied to identity, and a person’s identity is complex. Throughout life we adapt our identities to fit the demands, pressures and expectations placed on us by ourselves and by others. Created identities, learned beliefs and acquired defence mechanisms cover up our true purpose, aspirations and dreams. We may think we want something when, if we look deeper, there’s a more basic and fundamental underlying need. So before setting your goals, be confident they align with your purpose. You find your purpose through self-exploration and honest reflection.
Step 2: understand human nature, in yourself and others
Each person has a unique individual nature that differentiates them from everyone else. But we also share a common human nature, tied to our physiology and psychology. Leaders need to be consciously aware of how our brains automatically and unconsciously work to protect us from real and perceived threats. These triggers happen all the time, and they can lead to undesirable outcomes: interpersonal conflict, difficulty solving problems, diminished creativity and innovation, demotivation, poor career satisfaction and many others.
To empower others and bring out their best, a leader needs to understand things like the fight-or-flight mechanism, automatic defensive behaviours, and the brain’s processes for motivation, bias, reward and fear. Most important of all is gaining an intimate awareness of your own inner workings, which makes it far easier to perceive the same qualities in others.
Step 3: shift your perspective on conflict and fighting
People have been fighting and experiencing conflict since before recorded history. Conflict is everywhere, from struggling to get out of bed in the morning, to solving hard business challenges, to geopolitics. And fighting, the way we choose to manage and resolve that conflict, comes in many shades along a spectrum.
At one end is the fighting we all recognize: yelling, insults, domination. It’s an adolescent kind of fighting, one we begin exploring naturally as kids, and in adult life it leads to negativity, anger, stress, disempowerment, burnout and constrained thinking. At the other end are mature kinds of fighting you don’t often hear called fighting at all: dialogue, debate, collaboration, introspection, understanding. They manage and resolve conflict too, and their results are the opposite: optimism, hope, empowerment, creativity, innovation, intrinsic motivation.
A leader who recognizes which shade is in play can catch a structured debate as it starts devolving into something adolescent, and steer it back towards the mature end. This spectrum is what my Shades of Fighting course is built around, and the article “How adults fight” on this site walks through the workplace version. The step here is simply learning to see conflict and the way you fight as two separate things, so the response becomes a choice.
Step 4: discover, develop and practise your personal strengths
Empowering leaders draw on personal strengths that can be learned, practised and strengthened like any skill. The core strengths of a great leader are empathy and compassion. In a Catalyst survey of nearly 900 US employees, people with highly empathic senior leaders were far more likely to report being innovative (61% versus 13%) and engaged at work (76% versus 32%), and reported better inclusion and work-life balance as well.
People have different definitions and understandings of these terms, so it’s important to fully understand what they mean, how to cultivate them, and how to inspire others to do the same. Compassion in particular is a powerful counter to the negative effects of fear and threat described in step 2.
Other strengths leaders can practise include genuine curiosity, command over their attention, fluid focus, decision and choice, taking action, perception, perspective, motivation and language use. It’s easy to think and read about modern leadership skills; mastering them requires dedicated effort and practice, because in many ways your brain’s automatic survival processes get in the way. Learning to gain more command over those aspects of yourself is what lets these skills reach their full power.
Step 5: experiment, iterate and reflect
Once you have deeply explored steps 1 to 4, the final and continuing step is to evaluate your progress and how effectively you’re putting those concepts into action. Think of each day and each action you take as a mini experiment: reflect on the results, iterate, and try a new approach. This is where the real learning and development takes place.
As a leader, the example you set helps to inspire, motivate and empower others to forge their own productive paths. Leaders illuminate the path so others can see more clearly where they want to go. That’s a high expectation to live up to, isn’t it? Nobody is perfect, and leaders should feel comfortable being just a little vulnerable, showing others that they too are still growing. It’s a way of connecting with people and putting them at ease. It can be a delicate balance.
Introspection is a strength of its own
Small setbacks can lead to big improvements. A self-reflective, iterative attitude keeps you demonstrating strength of character and integrity while staying true to your purpose. This is what people mean by “lead by example”, and it’s quite different from “lead through authority”.
Self-reflection is itself a kind of fight – a mature form of fighting you conduct within yourself. It takes energy to accurately observe your effectiveness, your challenges, the impacts you have and the nature of your relationships with others. There will be emotional friction as you hold this dialogue with yourself. The point is not to criticize yourself and feel negatively, but to see new opportunities and feel positive about experimenting with them.
Unite the five steps within yourself
The five steps dig into the core competencies that nurture great modern leadership. As you work on your leadership skills, try not to think about “collecting skills”; think about developing yourself as a whole, from the inside out. That gives you a more natural capability to act on what you learn and put it into practice.
Leadership can indeed be taught, but not in the conventional sense. A set of enabling base skills can be introduced, and then each person grows into their own unique version of a leader. Reading about these skills builds context and awareness; embodying them takes deeper exploration and practice. You don’t learn to be a leader – you work to become one.