5 People Skills To Become A Great Leader – Principles That Truly Matter

I am sharing 5 people skills to become a great leader. Yes, there are a lot of people skills needed to be good at leadership. The ones I am discussing today are some of the most important people skills; the ones that every really great leader displays; the people skills that results in people wanting to follow these leaders.

These skills are the ones that have mattered most to me in my career from EY trainee to reaching a board director role of a large company in my 30’s. These are the skills that leaders I know who manage hundreds of staff members shout loudly about too.

5 People Skills To Become A Great Leader

Clear, concise and persuasive communication
Being courageous
Demonstrating integrity
Showing authenticity
Being flexible – changing to the situation and person

Great leaders bring something out of us. They encourage, motivate, and inspire just by being themselves. They create trust, appreciation and loyalty. Great leaders carefully balance the many competing demands of the business, the team and the individual.

The reason we follow great leaders has little to do with their official position, or because we have to. We choose to follow great leaders. For example, two of the most amazing leaders of people I have had in my life – the first was my maths teacher during GCSEs and A-levels and the second was my best boss ever in my third proper job of my career. I have worked in some amazing companies with very high quality leaders. These two stood out because of how they made me feel and what they inspired me – and those around me – to do.

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develop clear, concise and persuasive communication – The first of the people skills to become a great leader

There are lot of communication skills that go into being able to communicate clearly, concisely and persuasively. 5 of the most important to develop are

Active listening skills along with great questioning skills
Practicing being clear and concise in what you say
Knowing how to provide really good useful feedback
Being good at negotiating and persuading others
Being open and honest as a default to build and maintain trust

Covering each is a little more detail.

Active Listening

Active listening takes time and effort to do. You can’t listen when thinking about what you going to say next or thinking about the latest problem you are trying to solve. Actively listening includes hearing the words spoken, taking them in and understanding the meaning behind those words. You should also be paying careful attention to all the non-verbal communication you are receiving.

Being Concise

Being clear and concise is conveying your message with good structure and with as few words as necessary. The less words spoken, the less effort needed by listeners to understand your message.

Providing Feedback

Providing feedback – whether praise or corrective feedback – should always be given to help and improve the other person. It should be specific, well thought out and delivered diplomatically and with empathy. Things are rarely black or white.

Active listening - people skills for leadership

Negotiating and Persuading

Negotiating and persuading starts with understanding the other person’s position and what they want. Do this and you are halfway there. Use what the other person wants to position what you want and you are much more likely to get what you want. Win-win is nearly always better than one person loosing.

Telling it How It Is

Finally, and most importantly, communicate with honesty and openness. This is telling the hard truth. Not shying away from difficult messages. Being a provider of information rather than a hoarder. It is sharing your own views and opinions even if this goes against the crowd or your boss. It is being genuine and authentic.

Get all these right and people will listen to what you have to say because they trust and respect you plus you make it easy to listen to you.

Your feedback is vital - people skills in leadership

The second of the people skills to become a great leader is being courageous

Leading is making change happen. Managing is improving the status quo. Both are very different from each other. Leadership takes courage. The courage to speak your own mind, to share your ideas, to accept another’s solution when it is better than yours.

Leadership is the courage to challenge authority to improve results, improve the culture, improve decisions or because it is the right thing to do.

A critical people skill is learning how and when to protect your team and having the courage to say no. No to low value requests. No to too many changes of direction. Or no to decisions that leave the majority worse off.

Finally, great leadership is having the courage to allow your team to hold you accountable. For example sharing your personal goals and the tracking of progress towards those goals.

Leadership is courage. Without the courage to speak up and to take action, you would not be a leader.

communicate openly - people skills for leadership

3 – demonstrate integrity – a vital people skill

Trust is a very big deal when leading and managing others. Trust is needed to build relationships. Relationships enable a person to lead or manage well and effectively. Lose trust and your ability to manage or lead plummets.

Some very important ways to demonstrate your integrity at work include:

Communicating openly and honestly
Telling the truth, even when it hurts you personally
Being consistent and fair to all employees
Personally living the rules and expectations you set for the team
Matching your actions to your words – i.e. you do what you say
You are authentic and true to yourself, your beliefs and your values
Being the same person to the trainee as the CEO
You don’t employ tricks or underhand tactics

Behaving with integrity is doing all these things even when no-one is watching or will not catch you out. Demonstrating integrity is not a switch you turn on or off depending on the situation. It is always on.

This consistency of approach, the consistency of how you deal with everyone around builds your integrity. When people know what they will get they feel safer, they trust more, they are more willing to follow.

The fourth of the people skills to become a great leader is showing Authenticity

Authenticity is not just about demonstrate integrity. You can be very honest and not show anything of your own character and personality to others.

I once worked with a person who wat brilliant at having 10 minute conversations and putting people at their ease. After a year of working with this person, I didn’t really know anything of importance about them. They never revealed anything important about themselves.

Did I NOT trust this person. I couldn’t. I didn’t know anything about their values. I didn’t know much about their character and how they might react in different situations. I didn’t know if I really liked them or not. Everything was unknown and I didn’t feel any connection.

Being authentic is not about oversharing either. We all have many different personas. We have our work personas, our home personas, our out with friend personas. These might all be similar. They are unlikely to the same yet all of these different personas can be authentically you. You don’t have to reveal everything to be authentic.

Being authentic is also sharing some of your faults, your fears, your dislikes. It is admitting to mistakes and things you have don’t wrong. We all make mistakes. These are what make us relatable. Balance displaying your very competent self with revealing some of your downsides too. Be empathetic and be relatable.

Be the real you. Be authentic.

Developing Trust is a very big deal - people skills

5 – Be Flexible – essential to become a great leader

When managing or leading teams you are constantly stepping into the new. There are new situations to deal with. Many will be similar to situations you have already encountered. Some will be completely new.

Added to this, everyone in your team is different. They have different strengths, different backgrounds, beliefs, values, communication styles and more.

Add different situations and different people together and something will be new. You cannot lead or manage others successfully by applying the same approach to everything. You guarantee failure 90%+ of the time or at best, an okay outcome rather than a great outcome.

So being flexible as a leader is demonstrating:

You can and do adapt your approach to the person and situation. You do what is best rather than what you know or what you are comfortable doing
Great leaders change their leadership style to the people they lead and the situation. By flexing they get more from the people they lead and better outcomes from the situations they face.
Being flexible is allowing yourself to be persuaded. It is seeking the best solution regardless of where it comes from. You know your way is not always the best way.
Reserving judgement is another skill of great leaders. You don’t approach situations with a solution already decided. You find out, learn and understand before making decisions.

A leader’s job is to get the best from the team they lead and to do their best for the team they lead. Working at building great people skills is essential to becoming a great leader.

in summary

There are a lot of people skills to become a great leader. You will have many of the skills needed already. Which ones do you concentrate on making better as quickly as possible to do an even better job of leading teams and businesses. These 5 skills are the top people skills to become a great leader in my view: