Leadership Minute: Five Must Have Skills For Tomorrow’s Leaders

A regular column devoted to developing the skills necessary to lead in the 21st century workplace.

Every now and then it is important to take a personal inventory of your skills and abilities. I don’t mean an end of the year surface-level, quick, “hey, I’m great” type of thing. I’m talking about an honest, candid evaluation of yourself as a leader. A deep look inside.

Every time I have done this over the years, I also ask myself, “What skills do I need to develop to be more successful in the future?” There are five must have leadership skills on my list this year. They are:

Learner

Every leadership book speaks about how important it is for a leader to be able to handle and manage change (when it happens). Here’s a new flash — everything now moves so fast that the new norm is a constant state of change. The only way to keep up is to have an insatiable desire to learn new things and the ability to synthesis that learning into actions that will better prepare you and your organization. You must be a learning every day.

Champion

Unless you are the CEO or President, just about every project, initiative, or new business endeavor you propose is likely to be met with skepticism. That’s ok, it’s healthy, just be prepared for it. Consensus build every chance you get. You need to make things happen by continually gaining the support of those around you.

Futurist

An eye toward the horizon, knowledge of emerging trends, understanding of the impact of economic changes, these are just of few of the reasons it’s important to be forward looking. It is your responsibility to see the new openings in the market, the potential obstacles, and prepare yourself and your organization to deal with them.

Web Savvy

It’s a do it yourself world now. It’s time for leaders to have an extremely high level of comfort with all the web tools surrounding social networking like URL shorteners, monitoring applications etc, in addition to the actual sites themselves – like Twitter, LinkedIn etc. I’d even go so far to say that a basic knowledge of HTML is going to be a prerequisite for any job in a few short years. Get ahead of the curve and know more about the Web than your employees do.

Fear Nothing

Fear is crippling. Fear holds you back. Fear prevents risk taking. Fear stymies creativity. Fear prevents you from stepping outside of your comfort zone.

Fear Nothing. Especially failure. Get over the societal conditioning that failure is a negative event. Take every failure as an opportunity to be a Learner. And grow.

Fear is an emotion that can be controlled and directed. Change your mindset and Fear Nothing.

What are your must have leadership skills for tomorrow?

Post Update April 9th, 2010: This post was originally published on February 12th, 2010 as the Four Must Have Skills For Tomorrow’s Leaders. On March 4th, 2010, I read an article titled, “Fear Nothing” written by Adam Singer on his blog, The Future Buzz. It changed my thinking. So much so, I believe Fear Nothing is a skill that as leaders we must develop.

Author: Jeremy Victor | Website | Twitter

Jeremy's the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com. B2Bbloggers.com is a B2B Marketing online magazine discussing the evolution of B2B marketing. Topics include content marketing, B2B social media, demand generation, marketing automation, and more. Sign up. Get all the articles via email.