Effective leadership skills: Leaders learn best on the job

If you care about developing yourself as a leader, if you want more effective leadership skills, what should you do? What is the best approach?

Many books have been written on leadership. There are hundreds in print right now. There are also many articles and videos available on the subject. You’ll also find plenty of training programs, both online and in-person, and many are very well produced.

But to help you navigate through all of these resources, consider this: There is a big difference between KNOWING something and DOING something. In the end, what you know is far less important than what you do with the knowledge. When you are with people, are you applying what you learned? If you don’t translate knowledge into action, it doesn’t do you much good.

In practical terms, the best books, videos, and training programs do a couple of things. First, they present a model of effective leadership skills: they show you what you should be doing at work. The problem is that not everyone does that. They can contain a lot of good information on leadership principles. Hopefully, the treatment is interesting. You can gain some self-awareness; It is always good to know what your strengths and weaknesses are. But what you really need to know is what you need to do to get the best effort out of your people. So, ideally, you learn about a model of how to act with people. If the resource doesn’t give you this, you’re probably wasting your time with it.

But knowing what to do, having good role models for effective leadership skills, is just the beginning.

A training course, even a two-week one, which is rare, is not enough to make you so comfortable with effective leadership skills that you wouldn’t hesitate to use them on people. The reason is that these courses have a lot of topics to cover and there is not a lot of time to practice in class. It takes time to ingrain a skill to the point where you would instinctively use it in the real world of work. This is because the brain cells involved in the skill need time to develop connections and form a network that makes the skill efficient and comfortable. You have to apply what you learned over and over again to rewire your brain for the skill. The time depends on how many opportunities you take to apply it. The idea is to turn an effective leadership skill into a work habit, and that could take months or even a year.

This is how you develop any habit, a skill, or a pattern of behavior. There is no shortcut. You have to do the work. And the only place this can happen is at work.

When it comes to developing effective leadership skills, experience really is the best teacher. A smart manager follows cues from her interactions with people. For example, someone might say, “I don’t like it when you talk to me like that.” Or something could go wrong in your group. You may be trying things and they don’t work. Each of these cases is an experience from which you can learn.

So when you get suggestions on what to do as a leader, try them out and learn from the experiences. If you do this, day after day, year after year, you’ll be participating in the best kind of leadership development program out there.