Developing Leadership Skills, Traits and Managerial Grids

Leadership skills is one of the most common parts we hear when discussing HR management or business management. These traits and skills are needed in an organization to achieve the vision and mission and improve the quality of the company.

There are so many references that we can use when discussing developing leadership skills, you could even say there is a wealth of information available on leadership development.

However, Here we will refer to a book The Leader’s Tool Kit: Hundreds of Tips and Techniques for Developing the Skills You Need by Cyril Charney.

We will also slightly quote some of the discussions in the book Fundamentals of Management by Stephen Robbins and David Decenzo.

Check out the full explanation below if you want to know how to develop leadership skills properly.

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Learning Six Traits of Effective Leadership, What Are They?

A leader articulates and embodies a vision and goals, enabling others to share and achieve them. Whereas leadership is a state of mind, a vision, spirit, and character. Leadership involves getting diverse individuals to work together as a team.

But then, what are traits of effective leadership?

Drive: Leaders exhibit a high effort level. They have a relatively high desire for achievement, have a lot of energy, show initiative, and are persistent in their activity.
Desire to lead: Another trait of leaders is having a strong desire to influence and lead others.
Integrity: Leaders also build trusting relationships between themselves and followers by being truthful.
Self-confidence: Followers look to leaders for an absence of self-doubt. Leaders, therefore, need to show self-confidence in order to convince followers to attain goals and make good decisions.
Intelligence: Furthermore, leaders need to be intelligent enough to gather, synthesize, and interpret large amounts of information to create a vision and solve problems.
Job-relevant knowledge: Last but not least, effective leaders have traits of a high degree of knowledge about their company and industry.

Six of them are important to build a high performing leader as stated on The Leader’s Tool Kit: Hundreds of Tips and Techniques for Developing the Skills You Need. In case you want to start developing leadership skills, try to inherit those traits within you.

Now then, lets move on into another important matter to discuss the managerial grid of leader.

Managerial Grid of Leader, Definition and How It Works

What is managerial grid of leader? The Managerial Grid is a leadership model contains a two-dimensional model that assesses leaders based on their concern for people and concern for production.

Let say its, like this..

Concern for people: This dimension measures how much a leader cares about the needs, feelings, and well-being of their subordinates.

Concern for production: This dimension measures how much a leader focuses on achieving organizational goals and tasks.

I think we understand what is stated above, but how does it relate with the grid system?

Well, the model identifies five different leadership styles based on the combination of these two dimensions:

Country Club Management (9,1): High concern for people, low concern for production. Leaders create a comfortable and friendly work environment, but may neglect task accomplishment.
Task Management (1,9): Low concern for people, high concern for production. Leaders are primarily focused on achieving goals and tasks, and may neglect the needs of their subordinates.
Middle-of-the-Road Management (5,5): Moderate concern for people and production. Leaders balance the needs of their subordinates with the demands of the task.
Team Management (9,9): High concern for people and production. Leaders create a work environment where subordinates are committed to the organization and motivated to achieve high performance.
Impoverished Management (1,1): Low concern for people and production. Leaders are uninvolved and have minimal interest in their subordinates or the organization.

Do you understand it? Hope you do. Basically The Managerial Grid is a popular tool for assessing leadership styles and developing leadership skills. It can help leaders identify their strengths and weaknesses, and develop strategies for improving their effectiveness.

To be honest we should able to discuss Contingency Model of Leadership and Elements of High Performing Leadership, but the time is just too short.

But don’t worry, in hr-management-slides.com you can download our presentation template materials for free. This includes “Developing Leadership Skills” the continuation of what we explain here.

Download the HR presentation template today and change, modify its visual according to your needs!