The Facts:

Leadership can be learned and mastered if you are willing to do the work!

The Challenge:

The skills, capabilities, and expectations required for you to successfully lead yourself, lead teams, and lead at the organizational level escalate as you advance in your career.

The Watch Out:

Business professionals invest significant time and energy learning the technical aspects of their roles and building their expertise. They then use this knowledge as rationale for being promoted into higher-level positions. Unfortunately, they are often missing a big insight and wasting precious development time that can hold them back later in their careers.

The Mistake:

Executives who leave leadership development and focusing on their soft skills for later in their career, believing that they are a lower priority than technical skills or thinking they can focus on these skills/behaviors when they need them. There is no “just in time” or “plug and play” approach to leadership.

Soft skills, often referred to as emotional intelligence (EQ), take time to learn and significantly affect the quality of your relationships. Most importantly, they have consistently been proven to be more influential to career success and income than the technical aspects of a professional’s role! To put it bluntly, your ability to influence and lead other leaders requires a high level of emotional intelligence as well as what we call “personal power,” not just expertise or position power.

This is especially true if you want to advance beyond being a subject matter expert (SME) or individual contributor in your career and ultimately lead teams of people or secure an organizational leadership role.

The Opportunity:

Investing in leadership coaching early and continuously at the appropriate entry points can be priceless to both aspiring as well as established leaders as they learn how to influence, presence themselves, and develop the talent around them. These skills will likely distinguish a future team or organizational leader as a high-potential talent and separate them from the rest of the crowd.

Your talent is an asset that either appreciates or depreciates with time, and you can significantly accelerate your career and leadership development by partnering with a leadership coach who will challenge you to grow into your potential. This is true for all leaders and all levels.