The Leadership Skills You Think You’ve Outgrown May Be the Ones You Need Most

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It's easy to get caught up in complicated answers to problems and forget to go back to the fundamental skills. But here's why you need them.

So often in leadership circles we look for the complicated answer — the one that requires input from all team members and takes scrutiny from every angle. And, to be honest, sometimes that is exactly what’s needed. But I’ve found that more often than not, what’s really required to make sense of a situation or find direction is a return to basics.

The fundamental unit of work is a conversation. Part of working well together means learning and practicing these fundamental skills such as active listening, presence, asking open, honest questions and deciding who makes decisions and how they are made in any conversation. In your business, these are the skills that give you an edge and foster healthy collaboration, clear speaking, making sure that the vision is well understood and that good commitment hygiene is tended to.Many leaders learn to be patient, make decisions, move forward by weighing pros and cons and — if you’re lucky — trust their intuition.

Sophisticated solutions tend to masquerade as expertise, and reaching for a basic skill can feel almost shameful when you’re trying to wear the mask of an infallible leader. It’s hard to set ego aside and use the tools you started with. It’s a lesson in humility that’s not easy to learn. ‘I’ve learned so many new things since I first began, so why would I do something so simple?’ This is a question a client brought to me when I suggested drawing on listening skills to work through a team dispute.

Sure, you have new skills and knowledge, and you’re most certainly not the person you were when you started your career, but that doesn’t mean those core skills of good leadership you learned a long time ago are baseless. Returning to what you know at your core is often the advice I give to my clients. It’s also frequently the advice they need to hear.

There are some ways to tell if your efforts to solve a problem are caught in an endless loop.

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