Prioritize leadership development by helping employees become more effective and empowered.

Learning and development is vital to any company wanting to build and retain top talent. According to the Harris Poll, 70% of employees would leave their current company for one that invests in their L&D. But as workplaces — and the world — have radically changed before us in recent years, so too have the skills that leaders need to thrive.

“I used to think that leadership and getting to the next level was about taking on more and more: more responsibility, more work, more accolades, more obligations, more everything,” says Dr. Matt Poepsel, Vice President & “The Godfather of Talent Optimization” at The Predictive Index. “And I’ve learned that it’s about doing less but doing it better.”

Teach leaders these five essential leadership skills to help them do exactly that.  

1. Self-awareness

Heightening self-awareness helps leaders make better decisions and optimizes team collaboration. “What you find among the most effective and celebrated leaders is that they have a certain lightness to them,” says Dr. Poepsel. “They’ve reconciled the fact that they can’t do it all. They can’t be everywhere at once. They can’t exclusively go, go, go all the time. Instead, they make better choices about the most important things to work on.”

With self-awareness, leaders have a better understanding of their strengths, their limits and their influence on team members. This emotional intelligence revolves less around improving the work and more around improving how leaders do the most critical work. And yet, according to Tascha Eurich, researcher and the author of Insight, while 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, just 10% to 15% actually are. (A.k.a., a significant area of opportunity.)

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