We are bringing light to a distinction between leadership competencies and leadership capacity that is absolutely critical in the leadership development field, because not understanding this distinction severely limits equipping leaders to handle today’s challenges.
Training and development professionals are often tasked with making lists of leadership competencies, which are generally presented as leadership behaviors and skills that, when developed, can contribute to superior performance. We can use the example of “collaboration.” Collaborative leaders clearly drive higher engagement and generate better and more sustainable results.
Leadership capacity is the ability to think and then act in ways that are more effective during times of increasing VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) and rapid change. Increasing leadership capacity (rather than just teaching competencies) is known as vertical development.
Strong leadership is essential for organizational success But how exactly can you expand your leadership abilities and positively impact those around you?
Developing your leadership capacity takes dedication and self-reflection In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore proven methods for leveling up your leadership skills and making a greater difference in your workplace
By investing in building your leadership capacity, you can:
- Inspire and motivate your team
- Drive change and innovation
- Improve performance and results
- Advance your career development
Let’s dive into the key steps you need to take to unlock your leadership potential.
Step 1: Determine Your Core Values
Your leadership capacity starts with a strong sense of self-awareness. Take time to identify your core values and reflect on what matters most to you.
Ask yourself:
- What principles guide my life and leadership?
- What am I passionate about?
- What type of legacy do I want to leave?
Defining your values provides an ethical North Star to guide your actions and decisions as a leader It also helps you lead with authenticity and connect with team members on a deeper level,
Make a list of 5-10 values like integrity, growth, teamwork, etc. Keep these top of mind as you continue strengthening your leadership abilities.
Step 2: Set Your Leadership Goals
The next step is setting specific development goals to expand your leadership capacity over time.
Potential goals could include:
- Improving communication and active listening
- Providing better coaching and mentoring
- Driving team engagement and morale
- Championing diversity and inclusion
- Managing change more effectively
- Cultivating innovation and creativity
Outline 2-3 leadership goals to focus your efforts. Make them S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Tracking your progress will help you stay motivated as you work to enhance your leadership capabilities.
Step 3: Develop Your Communication Skills
Communication is foundational to impactful leadership. Strategically build skills like active listening, public speaking, writing, and more.
Active listening – Give your full attention when others speak. Reflect back key points and restate to confirm understanding.
Public speaking – Get comfortable presenting to both small and large groups. Focus on being engaging, persuasive and memorable.
Writing – Practice summarizing complex topics clearly and concisely in emails, documents and reports. Strong writing translates to stronger leadership.
Nonverbal communication – Be mindful of body language, eye contact, tone of voice, and other subtle ways you communicate without words.
Sharpening your communication abilities will help you better relate, inform, influence and inspire those around you.
Step 4: Embrace Feedback and Self-Reflection
Continuous self-improvement is critical for boosting your leadership skills. Welcome feedback from others and dedicate time for honest self-reflection.
Seek feedback – Ask trusted colleagues, mentors and team members for constructive critiques of your leadership style and impact on those around you. Listen with an open mind.
Reflect regularly – Identify your leadership strengths and weaknesses. Review your mistakes and successes to glean key lessons. Reflect on your growth and areas for improvement.
Analyze your impact – Observe how your words and actions influence people. Are you motivating others to top performance? How could you be more influential?
Update your goals – Use insights from feedback and self-analysis to refine your leadership goals and become more effective over time.
View feedback and self-reflection as opportunities to fuel your leadership growth, not criticisms. By actively listening to others and being your own toughest critic, you can maximize your leadership capacity.
Step 5: Create Welcoming Spaces
Great leaders cultivate inclusive environments where people feel welcomed, respected, and heard. Make developing these spaces a priority.
Foster diversity – Seek out and embrace diverse perspectives. Give equal opportunities to team members of all backgrounds.
Support work-life balance – Be understanding of team members’ lives outside work. Offer flexibility when possible.
Encourage open dialogue – Welcome ideas, questions and concerns. Be approachable and ensure people feel comfortable speaking up.
Promote camaraderie – Organize opportunities for people to socialize and bond as a team. Have some fun together!
When people feel valued for who they are, they’ll be more engaged, loyal and productive. An inclusive culture also unlocks innovation.
Step 6: Invest in Continuous Learning
Expanding your leadership abilities never stops. Dedicate time for ongoing professional development through trainings, mentorships, and self-learning.
Take leadership training courses – Formal programs allow you to learn proven frameworks and best practices while networking with peer leaders.
Find a mentor – Learn from someone with more experience. A mentor can share invaluable first-hand leadership lessons.
Read books – Stay up to date on the latest leadership strategies and tactics to improve how you manage, influence and motivate your team.
Listen to podcasts and talks – Diving into inspiring audio content keeps leadership top of mind during commutes or other downtime.
Join professional organizations – Surrounding yourself with other skilled, ambitious leaders creates a positive peer effect to elevate your capabilities.
Make continuous leadership development a lifelong practice. Never stop working to enhance your skills and potential as a leader.
Step 7: Identify Leadership Opportunities
Opportunities to demonstrate leadership capacity might not just fall in your lap. You need to actively seek out and even create them yourself.
Volunteer for projects – Raise your hand to lead key initiatives and task forces. Apply your skills beyond your formal role.
Solve pressing issues – What challenges is your organization facing? Develop solutions to drive impact and become a recognized leader.
Innovate new processes – Identify inefficient processes and propose new tech, systems and operations to spark positive change.
Coach fellow colleagues – Share your expertise and advice to help coworkers improve and excel in their roles too.
Lead by example – Model hard work, integrity, positivity, and excellence in everything you do. Inspire others to follow suit.
Look for daily chances to put your leadership abilities into practice. Over time, people will take notice and seek out your guidance.
Step 8: Build a Supportive Community
Leadership can feel like a lonely endeavor at times. That’s why developing a strong professional community is crucial for expanding your leadership capacity.
Network internally – Nurture relationships with influential leaders in your organization. They can provide wisdom and advocate for your advancement.
Connect externally – Attend conferences and events to build your network outside your company. Discover new mentors and partners.
Get a coach – A leadership coach provides personalized guidance tailored to your development needs and acts as an unbiased sounding board.
Join leadership groups – Surround yourself with like-minded professionals facing similar challenges. Share ideas and best practices.
The right community provides inspiration when facing leadership challenges, feedback to grow, and contacts to open doors. Choose your tribe wisely.
Step 9: Focus on Making a Positive Difference
At the end of the day, leadership comes down to people. Keep your focus on making a meaningful positive difference in the lives of those around you.
Ask yourself daily:
- How can I help my team develop and achieve more?
- What can I do to make someone’s work life better today?
- How am I inspiring others and guiding them towards success?
Let your “why” drive everything you do as a leader. When your purpose is clear, your leadership capacity will skyrocket.
Keep Building Your Leadership Muscles
Expanding your leadership abilities is a lifelong endeavor requiring constant dedication to growth and improvement. Use the strategies outlined in this guide as fuel to build your leadership capacity day by day.
Stay hungry. Continuously raise your standards of excellence. And keep your vision trained on making an ever-increasing positive impact with your leadership.
You have immense leadership potential within you. Now get out there, lead by example, and make your organization and community better through your inspiring influence!
The Basic Problem in the Field of Leadership Development
More than half of all leaders think like the first leader we described above, and those leaders have little choice to think at a more advanced level in the moment. Only about 10 percent think like the second leader.
Can you understand the problem? Having talent development professionals create a list of competencies does not mean that most leaders have the capacity to “run” those competencies using a sufficiently advanced “operating system” to actually embody them.
And most training and development professionals do not know how to assist leaders in upgrading their overall operations systems or capacity. They can present trainings on their lists of competencies but much of that energy is wasted. Leaders, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot “will” themselves to a later-stage level of development.
The other problem with lists of competencies is that all leaders already have a day job and have very little bandwidth for integrating new ideas. As we wrote in a previous article for Training Industry, Awareness ≠ Change. Change is hard and takes repeated cycles of action and reflection throughout the day. Even with the most sophisticated approaches we know, integrating advanced in neuroscience, one or two areas of change are all we can handle.
What is the difference between competencies and capacity?
In our work, we use a map of adult development applied to leadership, Levels of Development-in-Action (see Figure 1). Just as children keep changing “operating systems” throughout their young lives, as adults we keep developing at later-stage “operating systems.”
Think of competencies as software on a computer, which become increasingly more effective using more advanced operating systems. Leadership capacity is about the structure of our thinking – not what we think about but rather how we think about it.
What is different for leaders at later stages of adult development?
- Leaders are more reflective. They think more about what they are doing and how to do it better.
- They are better able to take perspectives (putting themselves in others’ shoes) and to seek perspectives (asking questions to understand how others see things).
- They are better able to integrate multiple factors, and thus make decisions that incorporate the perspectives of different stakeholders (employees, customers, etc.), multiple timelines (short-term, long-term), and more.
- They are likely to have greater self-awareness, and allow themselves to be more vulnerable, acknowledging that they do not have all the answers and need the perspectives of others to optimize results. This allows them to be better at developing others and creating contexts imbued with safety and trust that then generate better solutions to complex problems.
Leaders who think at earlier stages of development will over-simplify complex problems. They will look for “one right answer” or “who is to blame.” Their approaches to these complex problems are inherently limited and likely will not know it.
For example, imagine a group of leaders attend a workshop about collaboration. One leader tends to see things only in terms of his own perspective. He assumes he knows the “right” way to do things, believes there is “one right answer,” has low self-awareness, and has difficulty admitting when he is not sure of something. Imagine how limited his collaboration will be. He may ask others superficial questions, mostly to get their buy-in to what he has already decided, but others know better than to question him.
Another leader knows that complex situations require the integration of multiple perspectives, has no problem exhibiting vulnerability by saying and believing they don’t know all the answers, and provides a context that makes it clear that all perspectives are valued and welcomed. There is no fear that ideas will be dismissed or discounted or ridiculed. Imagine how rich the collaboration will be and how much more effective in driving sustainable organizational results.
4 Tips to Improve Leadership Skills | Brian Tracy
How do I build leadership skills & capacity?
If you’re interested in building your leadership skills and capacity, here are some steps you can take: 1. Determine your core values An important step in building your leadership capacity is developing your ability to lead with purpose. Genuine purpose often stems from your core values, so spend some time thinking about what matters most to you.
How can a leader build capacity?
In order to assess what a leader can do and build additional capacity, the organization must create the space for the leader to gain clarity about conscious and unconscious beliefs they hold. An understanding of those beliefs and how they inform actions is critical to understanding different perspectives and thinking more broadly. S: Skills.
What is leadership capacity?
Leadership capacity refers to a person’s ability to lead others effectively. It can include both natural abilities, along with learned skills and aptitudes.
How do you help a person develop leadership capacity?
Let them know what kinds of leadership they excel at and where they seem to be struggling. Then, offer to provide mentorship, classes, or other support to fill the gap. If they start to successfully learn how to adapt, let them know. Change is difficult. But with the right support, most people can develop leadership capacity.
