Good leadership skills include a range of personal characteristics backed up by knowledge and experience. Education is important for leaders, but the right personal qualities are far more important to leadership than educational record.
The characteristics of leaders
The most important skills for leaders lie in the relationship and inter-personal domain. Leaders are visionary, motivational and inspirational people who are emotionally intelligent, trustworthy. Key leadership skills are communication, drive and ambition.
Research conducted with the senior HR professionals who choose and shape future leaders identified the ability to motivate, emotional intelligence and a natural ability to lead as the most important characteristics for senior leaders.
Good leaders possess a balance of characteristics and strengths in one area do not compensate for weaknesses elsewhere.
The skills of leaders
Leaders need skills to back up their personal characteristics. They must be able to manage and develop people, communicate well, act as coaches and give constructive feedback and manage teams.
Knowledge for leadership
While personal characteristics are essential in a leader, they must also understand the field in which they operate, with a deep technical grasp of the essentials. Leaders must also have commercial and financial skills, to allow them to understand how business works and operate with business acumen.
Experience for leadership
Leaders also need a broad range of experience, encompassing different roles and, if possible, different industries. Because leaders need to cope with pressure and sometimes failure, experience of dealing with these and emerging the other side can be important.
ILM has conducted detailed research amongst organisations to discover the skills they prize most highly in leaders and the position on leadership skills we outline here is based on that research. We found that senior HR professionals, while they value education like MBAs to a degree, are more interested in focused development for leaders, that draws out and develops particular characteristics and is tied to specific industries. Read more on our leadership research.
Leadership and management study
ILM's courses develop and support leaders and managers, from those just starting out to those with years of experience. We believe all individuals can become better leaders and managers through development and training.