Are You A Competent Leader?

The Oxford dictionary definition of “competent” is “having the necessary ability, knowledge, or skill to do something successfully”.

When you think of someone being a competent leader, what images or descriptions come to mind?

Most likely the easiest definitions that come to mind are the following:

• Technical knowledge
• Industry experience
• Proven to achieve results, numbers, sales, metrics
• Ability to overcome obstacles

These criteria, while good, don’t portray the whole of what competent leadership is and should be. In fact, it only paints a partial picture — cold and technical, devoid of what matters to employees.

An article from Indeed from September 2020 posed a series of key competencies that every leaders should possess.

In these eight competency traits, none of them had anything to do with numbers, shares, or technical ability. They all dealt with interpersonal skills and being others-focused on the people that make up the organization.

We can understand that leadership needs to create results, but we often forget how to create those results because we’re so focused on the competencies that “matter” versus the “soft competencies” that inspire, develop and sustain those results over time.

A competent leader doesn’t just look at the end of period results and justify their efforts. They also look at the culture and temperature of the workplace and understand their people need to feel connected through trust, integrity, communication, self-discipline of their leaders and engaged teamwork in order to build and continue any degree of success.

One of the reasons noted leadership speakers John Maxwell and Peter Barron Stark discuss the need to competent leaders to develop along these “soft skills” to achieve great things.

In order to consider oneself a competent leader, one needs to make sure their employees endorse their “having the necessary ability, knowledge, or skill to do <this> successfully”.

The most competent leaders know this.

The value of a leader is not determined by their own success but by the success of their entire team.

What steps are you taking to ensure you prove to your people that you are competent? Write them down and make a commitment to work on those competencies this week.

(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)