If leadership is the ability to influence the behavior of others. Leadership skill could be defined behaviorally by a range of activities grouped loosely into the following categories:
- Initiating and Maintaining action
- Directing and Coordinating the activities of others
- Motivating/Stimulating others in the accomplishments of goals
- Assigning/Delegating tasks to others
- Holding others accountable for results.
Use the following questionnaire to evaluate your current leadership skill. Rate yourself according to the frequency with which you display the behaviors listed below.
Either us a granular scale e.g.:
Rarely -> Sporadically -> Frequently -> Almost Always -> Consistently
Or keep it simple and treat it like a True/False test.
The statements apply to your experience in all situations, work, and non-work, in which you have had an opportunity to display leadership.
Initiating and Maintaining Action
- When barriers occur, I look for alternative ways of accomplishing tasks.
- I don’t get bogged down in details.
- I initiate fresh approaches.
- I introduce procedures that avert possible problems.
- I develop and use processes that facilitate high performance.
Directing and Coordinating
- I ask others to restate the instructions I issue to make certain that I am understood.
- I coordinate the tasks I assign to take account of other tasks which must accompany, precede or follow them.
- I distinguish situations which require prescribed methods from those requiring individual initiative.
- I inform others about due dates and deadlines.
- I encourage questions and requests for information that I know contribute to task completion.
Motivating/Stimulating Others
- I demonstrate activities and when performance examples are needed.
- I inform others of their importance to the overall success of the enterprise.
- I encourage others to learn from their mistakes.
- I work with others to help them set personal achievement goals.
- I let others know when they have done a good job.
Assigning/Delegating Tasks
- I assign/delegate tasks in order of urgency.
- I assign/delegate tasks to others consistent with the needs of the situation.
- I delegate tasks to others in accordance with their experience and capabilities.
- In making assignments to others, I try to further their development by giving them new responsibilities.
- I assign tasks in a way that encourage others to use their initiative as much as possible.
Holding Others Accountable for Results
- In assigning work to others, I require them to accept responsibility for task completion, and/or I accept responsibility for my own task assignments.
- To avoid the possible misunderstandings about task requirements, I ask others to rephrase these in writing when beginning a new assignment.
- I hold others responsible for the quantity, quality, and timeliness of their completed assignments.
- I provide immediate feedback to others so that it is clearly associated with the task under review and/or I seek immediate feedback for my own assignments.
- When I give feedback, I review the task responsibility, the task requirements, and the actual performance in specific behavioral terms.
How well did you do, from your perspective?
Want a truer picture? Have the people you interact with regularly rate you and then make not of the disparities.
These are your blind spots, and they could be negative behaviors you are not aware of or positive attributes you are not giving yourself enough credit for doing.
Pick a category or a couple of key questions and create an action plan so you can lead better.