Skill Assessment: The Abstract Curse of Leadership

If only learning how to be a better leader were more concrete.

One of the challenges of not only doing, but also teaching/training leadership skills is their inherent abstract nature.

Do you know how to eat with a fork? Either you do or you don't. Do you know how to convert a document into a PDF? Either you do or you don't.

Do you know how to encourage others? Do you know how to resolve conflict? Do you know how to make a well-informed decision that will impact the future of your organization? Not quite so black and white. Yes, it is leadership's grey matter that can cause confusion and atrophy.

Your task as a leader-in-the-making is to do everything you can to make being an effective leader as concrete as possible. Learn specific behaviors and benchmarks that you can use to self-evaluate your effectiveness. Write down and apply what you learn. Take the abstractness out of it by keeping these lessons simple, personal, patternable, repeatable, and even formulaic if necessary.