Career Leadership Principles that Should Drive Your Journey

Aha Moment:

If you don’t navigate your journey, you’ll get stuck in your career. Leaders have a plan, a path, and a destination.

Great leadership skills aren’t a secret. But for some people, climbing the leadership mountain seems like an uphill battle.

Maybe you don’t feel like a great leader right now. Or you want to boost your leadership skills to get ready for your next role.

It doesn’t matter.

Leadership is one of those skills that can be taught.

And will be a necessary component of your success as you grow your career.

The truth is, most of us need leadership skills to get noticed by our boss, advance in our careers and confidently lead a team.

And many of us need to learn how to become better leaders.

So let’s dive into the six career leadership principles a good leader needs to know:

1. Choose to be a Leader. Don’t let your title dictate your value. Maybe you don’t have the skills now, but you can have them in the future if you commit to developing those skills and acting like you are your own CEO.
2. Learn how to set vision. Without a vision, people perish. The same goes for your teams. If you want to lead a team of one or 100, you need to have a vision. This simply means that you are able to see beyond today. What will success look like for your team or department? What kind of qualities do your people need?
3. Know how to listen. Leadership isn’t an island. Nor is it a one-way conversation – if you want to succeed as a leader. You don’t operate in a silo. Your team and employees need YOU to listen to THEM, too. In fact, listening is a highly undervalued but important quality for leaders.
4. Learn how to share. While most of us first learned about sharing in preschool, it’s possible that you’ve lost this skill over the years. It’s a very valuable one in a business or corporate setting. You see, a team atmosphere is imperative, so you need to know how to “share the journey” with your people. If you isolate a team member with poor communication and lack of direction, you’ll lose that member’s investment in your success.
5. Make simplicity a priority. Don’t make your job complicated. Become someone who is easy to do business with and simple to understand. In fact, simplicity should be one of the major guiding factors in your leadership climb. If you come up with a department-wide objective, or are leading a project, make sure to outline the precise steps your team should follow and make the task simple to execute.
6. When you model simplicity behaviors, you’ll ensure an efficient and productive endeavor. Innovate, Innovate, Innovate. Perhaps one of the most critical hallmarks of a successful leader is whether or not he or she can innovate. You see, what works today for your business probably won’t work or will need to be updated in two years, or five. The skillset your team needs to be productive now will need to change down the line. A great leader knows that to keep your competitive edge innovation must be a core value, and continuous improvement is the rule not the exception. Great leaders always ask “What if?” and “What’s Next?”

Leadership starts with choosing to make a difference and holding yourself accountable to live what you learn.

Remember important factors like having a vision, listening, sharing, keeping things simple and innovating – career leadership principflesupon which you can build a lifetime of success.

And you’ll quietly yet firmly take the necessary steps to grow into a leader that your organization can count on.