Inner Leadership Skills
Great leadership always shows up in the actions great leaders take—outer, visible skills. And that creates a problem.
Management and leadership training programs traditionally emphasize giving people training in these outer skills. Skills in relationships, coaching, negotiations, presentations, decision-making, organizational learning and more, can easily be described in terms of content and sequence. The difficulty with direct behavioral training in outer leadership skills is this: behavioral training does not guarantee using the skills naturally or with wisdom. Because of this, executives, managers, officers and others throughout the organization have rightfully judged that many approaches to leadership training and development are poor investments. To address this issue, we have listened to our clients and used their feedback to develop a process that works.
The Values-based® Leadership system is more development than training. It emphasizes bringing out your capabilities to learn key skills more than putting in information. In our approach, leadership skills consist of both outer and inner skills.
Regarding outer skills, we emphasize these: leadership counseling, requesting, apologizing, appreciating, negotiating, coaching, organizational learning and mentoring. In order for you and those in your organization to develop these outer skills and use them naturally and wisely, we also help you activate and develop your inner also.
What are the inner skills that bring about leadership? When I looked underneath effective outer leadership skills, I found 10 major inner skills. They are the integrity; empathy; objectivity; analytical thinking; wide-angle vision; long-term vision; seeing the good in others; preventing victim behaviors and the victim cycle; the deliberate synthesis of these many concepts into leadership intelligence, and projecting positive values in action for each situation into a real-time, operational leadership intelligence. By starting with these inner skills, learning becomes natural and fun while team members learn to wield powerful skills with leadership intelligence. When developed and used together, these 10 inner skills activate your intuitive leadership intelligence in any role for any situation.
Mastering Values Based Leadership requires a full commitment and sustained disciplined learning. It requires consistently activating healthy, cooperative values. And it requires developing and using inner and outer leadership skills on a daily basis.