Leadership Essentials | Elements of Exceptional Modern Leadership Part 1
2024.10.17
As a high-ambition leader, career advancement is important to you, and you want to know how to plan your professional development accordingly. And while the internet is full of information on leadership, you’ve been looking for a clear synopsis of important leadership skills.
Welcome to the Burnout Proof Leaders’ three-part series on Elements of Exceptional Modern Leadership.
In part 1 we’ll focus on the five very core essentials for leaders. These essentials have stood the test of time and there’s no reason to think they won’t be at the heart of leadership for decades to come.
In part 2, we’ll turn our attention to six fundamentals that used to be what only the best leaders did but are now becoming expected of all leaders.
In part 3, we’ll explore some cutting-edge leadership competencies that we believe will become more widespread in a decade or so.
5 Essential Leadership Skills
It is key to develop competency in each of the skills early on and to continue to hone them throughout your career. They remain important at every phase of your leadership arc – though they’ll look a little bit different as you evolve and grow.
Some of these are skills you can start building as an individual contributor or as a manager, others are hard to do unless you have true leadership responsibilities.
1. Managing Yourself
The first, most basic leadership skill is managing yourself. This includes things like knowing what motivates you, how you respond in challenges/conflicts, your working style and preferences, your basic skill-based strengths and weaknesses (at present), your learning style, what drains versus energizes you, tools and systems that work well for you in terms of organizing yourself and getting things done, as well as any other fundamental aspects of who you are as it pertains to work. An important part of managing yourself is periodically getting outside assistance in identifying your blind spots.
2. Managing Others
No matter their level in the organization, leaders typically have some managerial responsibility, so dialing in your skills managing others is important to do sooner rather than later. This includes things like defining projects, setting goals, giving feedback, managing conflict, monitoring performance, developing/mentoring/coaching staff, determining and executing hiring/terminations/promotions, etc. With more and more leadership responsibility, the number of people you directly manage typically shrinks and their needs as higher-level direct reports differ from those of more junior staff. It is important to adjust your managerial approach and hone your skills accordingly.
3. Maintaining and Growing Discipline-Specific Knowledge
As you progress in leadership responsibility, you’ll need to maintain and grow your discipline-specific knowledge. At lower levels of leadership, it might look like staying current on trends, methods, compliance/rules, etc. As you progress in responsibility, it often requires going from a narrow, highly-specific knowledge base to a broader one or to one that is more focused on the discipline within the context of risk and uncertainty. For example, consider the financial knowledge base required for the finance manager for a business unit versus what the CFO needs to know.
4. Setting Vision and Strategy
One of the characteristics that separates leadership work from strictly managerial work is that of having the responsibility for developing the vision and strategy and getting buy-in for it. At different levels this could be for the project, business unit, division, or organization. If you are new to this skill, know that it’s an art and a science – once you learn the technical elements of setting vision and strategy, there is still refinement to be done each time you do it.
5. Executive Skills
There is a whole skillset specific to the discipline of leadership – usually called either leadership competencies or executive skills – and all leaders need them to be proficient. A few examples include decision-making under uncertainty and ambiguity, instilling trust, persuasion, accountability, risk tolerance, network building, budget management, etc. Each executive skill is distinct and can absolutely be learned.
Essential Leadership Skills as Burnout Prevention
Aside from the fact that dialing in the skills for these five areas is important for your leadership to be effective, they’re also important as a burnout prevention tool.
High-ambition, mission-driven achievers are pre-disposed to pushing themselves to the limit. Since they are conditioned to work hard and get things done, sometimes they don’t stop to consider that if they developed additional skills, they could be more effective with less effort.
When you aren’t appropriately skilled in an area, it causes unnecessary stress, drains your energy, and incentivizes maladaptive coping behaviors.
The more proficient you are at the essential leadership skills, the more resilient you’ll be as a leader and less susceptible to burning out.
Your Next Actions
Wherever you are in your leadership journey, you’ll need to revisit these essentials periodically. As you advance in your career, proficiency in each area will look a little different.
If you’re a new leader, it’s worth setting aside a couple of hours to make a plan for assessing where you stand on each of the five areas, and to figure out what your developmental next actions are. From there, check in with yourself every quarter and reassess.
If you’re more seasoned as a leader, hopefully you mentally did a check-in as we went. Jot down any next actions you thought of. Revisit the list every 6 months.
In part-2 of this series we’ll build on these essential leadership skills and turn our attention to the six fundamentals of contemporary leadership.
If you found value in this content, please do us a favor and share this post with your favorite high-achieving, purpose-driven millennial or gen z leader.
Continue to part 2: Contemporary Leadership Fundamentals.
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