Seven skills that you must fine-tune to succeed in senior leadership
Leadership is an amalgamation of a broad range of skills, capabilities and competencies. Some of these, such as integrity, are the ‘price of admission’ for anyone serious about leadership at any level. Others, such as communication style, are likely to reflect an individual’s personality type eg: introversion or extroversion. Then there are ‘acquired based on traits admired in other leaders, such as motivational skills.
But that is not where it ends. As I have discovered from 17 years in senior leadership, once you progress up the hierarchy, into roles with greater levels of seniority and wider spans of control, there are specific skills that require further enhancement. This is necessary to heighten awareness, quicken reflexes, strengthen resilience and improve functional competence.
With these skills leaders can perform and a significantly higher level of capability. Without them, they experience the equivalent of severe sensory deprivation.
Set out below, are seven skills that you must fine-tune to succeed in senior leadership.
1. Cutting through the fog
The reality of higher-level responsibility is that on an almost daily basis, leaders are ‘assaulted’ with vast quantities of information. Much of this will be meaningless, but some, which may appear insignificant on the surface will mask critical risk. When risk is unobservable and indiscernible to the untrained eye, the skill of senior leadership is the ability to pick out critical detail, even when it is concealed and cloaked by the seemingly innocuous. This type of skill requires years of painstaking development and maturation, often through trial, error and learning.
2. People reading
The reason why ‘people reading’ is so important is because, as leaders graduate upwards in seniority, they need to both escalate and delegate. However, to do this they must have trust and confidence in those to whom they defer. Therefore, powers of discernment must be razor sharp to ascertain the fitness and capability of subordinates as well as superiors in the chain of command. This requires ‘spider-sense’ and poker player like sensitivity to ‘behavioural tells’ that could point to a lack of integrity, questionable values or susceptibility to compromise.
3. Decisiveness
The need here is for senior leaders to be ruthlessly clinical when required. This does not mean that they should present as robotic, callous or crass, it simply dictates that they are clear eyed and do not clutter their decision-making with immateriality. The context is that those in the most senior positions must make tough decisions, in a way that is rational, dispassionate and not clouded by emotions or sentiment. To that extent, whilst they should not seek conflict neither should they be affected by popularity polls or pursuit of image preservation.
4. Risk balancing
It would not be an exaggeration to say that every senior leader must be an accomplished plate spinner. That is not to say that senior leaders cannot afford to allow plates to crash to the ground, because of course they can. After all, in the circus tradition, plate spinning does not have the same risk as same as knife throwing. The art is calculating which plates are surplus to requirements and limiting risk exposure for those that are not. For senior leadership, these determinations are not always made with the luxury of time, but rather in the moment, based on fragments of information and best guesses.
5. Small ‘p’ political awareness
The need for an acute understanding of small ‘p’ politics and situational dynamics cannot be understated. Whilst policies, guidance documents and procedural manuals describe how an organisation works on paper, it is the customs and unwritten codes that define how it works in practice. It is these social conventions that serve to lubricate hierarchical joints and ensure organisational flexibility, without which inertia and paralysis would result. When it comes to navigating in tight spaces of small ‘p’ politics, senior leaders must know when silence speaks louder than words and when it is time to take things ‘offline’.
6. Subjectivity
There are occasions when you need to rely on years of experience and finely tuned instincts more than objective presentation of evidence and fact. That is not to say that objectivity should done away with. Rather, it highlights the need for a leader’s ability to see beyond observable facts to be refined to such a level, that it functions almost as a sixth sense. As irrational as this may seem, anyone who has occupied a senior role for any length of time will know precisely what is meant here. When cultivated correctly, subjectivity is not irrationality or recklessness, it is the science of intuitive logic.
7. Hyper adaptability
A competent and capable senior leader requires more than an ability to adjust to changes [even significant changes] to their situation. To be effective, they must fit seamlessly and imperceptibly into any environment, especially those that raise their stress levels. Therefore, the capacity for hyper-adaptability heightens the senior leadership ‘pain threshold’ and empowers them to cope with extremes. This includes the intensity of high-pressure or even hostile environments, where tolerance is tested to breaking point. As leaders move up the ladder of responsibility, they must embrace discomfort more than convenience.
The journey to senior leadership is a bit like the careful preparation that a climber undertakes in readiness to scale a high mountain. The footwear, clothes and other apparel taken for the journey would have been manufactured to exacting standards, to protect them from adverse conditions and to enhance their grip and stability in rugged terrain. So too it is with senior leadership, where the requisite skills need to be sharpened and upgraded to function effectively across the most inhospitable landscapes.
