Leadership Readiness: Are Your People Skills Ready? | #PeopleSkills

When you think of your leadership readiness, do you assess whether your people skills are ready too? Are you ready to inspire other human beings? Are your people skills ready to engage employees of different cultures, generations, and motivations? Can you handle the following human issues in your organization?



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Leadership Readiness: Are Your People Skills Ready? Image by 621crw via Flickr.

Grateful for image by 621crw via Flickr Creative Commons License.


Leadership Readiness: Get Your People Skills Ready!

At the heart of leadership is the ability to inspire and engage people to reach the vision. In my 25+ years of coaching leadership readiness, I have compiled this corresponding list of key people skills behaviors for leaders.

Are your people skills ready to …

  1. Put aside your personal pet peeves? If you don’t you may have everyone serving you instead of you and everyone serving the mission of the organization. Know your personal hot buttons and be ready to deactivate them. Great leaders rise about their own pet peeves to respect, recognize, appreciate, and inspire those they lead. Immature leaders can’t make this people skills connection. They focus on themselves and then are surprised when people aren’t inspired.

  2. Listen with an open mind? Or do you believe it will make you look weak and indecisive? Move past that mistaken belief. Open-minded is not indecisive. Engage in dialogues where you blend your expertise with those you lead. This is leadership readiness in some of its best moments.

  3. Lead inclusively? There are many generations and cultures in the workplace as well as more women than every before. Learn the differences in this diversity. Communicate so all can understand you. Tap everyone’s talent and include them in key issues. Implicit bias toward those who are like you — also known as affinity bias — can undermine your leadership readiness and success. Are you unknowingly showing discomfort with diversity?

  4. Handle bullying behavior in the workplace? If you look the other way, one day a toxic culture will be looking back at you. Don’t set yourself and your team up for this failure. With your teams, proactively define bullying behaviors and the positive behaviors to use instead. It’s a good first step. Once everyone is clear, you can handle behaviors that are not acceptable.

  5. Address people who are slacking off? Highly engaged employees will lose respect for you and your leadership if you give slackers a free ride. Team means everyone and leadership readiness means addressing those that are not contributing all they can.

  6. Deal with conflict or are you afraid of it? I have seen leaders become ineffective simply because they don’t like conflict. Some of them avoid conflict and employees feel abandoned. Others try to neutralize it by indirectly blaming everyone. If you sense you are one of these leaders, improve your leadership readiness by writing down what it is you fear. Is it something from your past? Does it ignite bad memories? Once you know your own issues, you can move past them and help everyone learn the difference between disagreement and conflict. Disagreements are valuable and when everyone disagrees while using great people skills, it prevents conflict.

  7. Help people to deal with and effect change. You must know how to balance empathy and firm encouragement to move people from the comfort of the present through discomfort to reach the future. Your lack of leadership readiness for leading change can create one of two problems. If you give loads of empathy about how difficult it is to change with no firm encouragement forward, you all get stuck in the present. If you heap on the firmness without empathy, those you lead will resist you, your insensitivity and the change. Once again you all get stuck in the present. Empathize and acknowledge their struggle and encourage them to move through it.


Leadership readiness is not an end point. It doesn’t stop. Situations change and people change. To be a great leader, develop and sharpen your people skills! I am here to help you and your organization with these challenges.



What people skills do you value most in leaders?



From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™

Related Posts:
How Leaders Preserve Bias & How to Stop
18 Things Respected Well-Liked Leaders Consistently Do

©2017 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. I appreciate your sharing the link to this post on your social streams. However, if you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com for permission and guidelines. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.


Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.



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