Leaders are often thought to be born with innate talents that make them destined for leadership roles. However, the truth is that leaders must cultivate key skills through dedicated practice to reach their full potential. As organizational psychologist David Burkus explains, the “nature versus nurture” debate around leadership traits misses the point—leaders must develop their abilities over time regardless of their innate talents. By regularly sharpening a few critical leadership habits, anyone can vastly improve their leadership capabilities.
Developing Clarity Within Your Team
One of the most vital skills for effective leadership is the ability to create clarity for your team. As the business environment grows increasingly complex and fast-changing, employees look to leaders to provide direction amid uncertainty.
Great leaders establish clarity in three key areas:
Defining Your Big, Hairy Audacious Goal
The first component of clarity involves clearly articulating your “BHAG” or big, hairy audacious goal. What is the overarching, ambitious objective your team is working towards? Communicating this North Star gives your team a fixed point to orient around.
Breaking Goals Down Into Milestones
In addition to defining the BHAG, leaders must also establish shorter-term milestones. These stepping stones mark progress towards the longer-term goal and help maintain momentum. Celebrating milestones along the way keeps teams motivated.
Ensuring Employees Understand Expectations
Finally, effective leaders provide clarity around expectations for each employee’s role. Through regular one-on-one check-ins, managers can ensure that every team member understands what “done” looks like for their unique contributions.
Additionally, leaders should facilitate team-wide check-ins where every employee shares updates on the status of their work. This allows individuals to flag potential roadblocks and offers visibility into what team members are working on. Establishing transparency around individual roles fosters alignment.
As you hone your ability to create clarity amid chaos, you will become a far more impactful leader.
Building Psychological Safety
Another fundamental leadership skill involves establishing psychological safety within your team. Psychological safety describes a climate where employees feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks without fear of negative repercussions. The ability to voice concerns, challenge ideas, admit mistakes, and disagree respectfully are all examples of interpersonal risks that require high psychological safety to emerge.
Leaders play a pivotal role in shaping team psychological safety through both their actions and their expectations of others.
Modeling Openness as a Leader
First, leaders must model the types of vulnerable, courageous behaviors that characterize psychological safety. As a manager, you should actively listen to disagreements without immediately rejecting contrarian perspectives. Ask thoughtful questions to understand alternative viewpoints rather than shutting them down outright.
Enforcing Respectful Dialogue Norms
Second, leaders must proactively enforce norms around respectful dialogue within their teams. If certain types of comments or behaviors undermine psychological safety, promptly address these issues. You may need to have candid conversations defining unacceptable conduct or coach team members on constructive disagreement.
By both demonstrating and insisting upon considerate, open communication, leaders pave the way for the interpersonal risks that enable innovation and progress.
Speaking to Higher Purpose
The final critical leadership practice involves regularly reinforcing your organization or team’s higher purpose. Decades of motivation research reveals that people perform at their best when they feel their work provides meaningful value to others. As such, effective leaders connect employees’ day-to-day responsibilities to this bigger-picture sense of purpose.
There are two key elements for speaking to higher purpose:
Linking Individual Roles to Collective Goals
First, clearly illustrate how each employee’s unique contributions help move the overall team closer to shared objectives. Helping individuals understand how their specialized work fits into the broader mission provides purpose and significance.
Connecting Team Goals to Prosocial Impact
Additionally, discuss how achieving your team’s goals ultimately contributes value to wider society, improves people’s lives or brings other prosocial benefits. This links day-to-day work to a sense of serving the greater good.
Simply reciting platitudes about ambition or profits fails to spark intrinsic motivation. By regularly reinforcing how employees’ efforts serve prosocial ends, leaders inspire their teams’ best performance.
The Path From Good to Great Leadership
Mastering even one of these three leadership skills—providing clarity, enabling psychological safety and communicating higher purpose—represents an opportunity for tremendous improvement. However, truly exceptional leaders incorporate all three habits holistically into their management approach over time.
The great news is that each of these practices represents a learnable skill you can deliberately sharpen rather than an innate leadership “gift.” With concerted effort and commitment to self-improvement, any leader can evolve from good to great.