LEADERSHIP & BUSINESS SKILLS

Leadership skills are what accelerate careers. Leadership skills fall into ten categories: value, competitive dynamics, problem solving, option creation, analytics, decision making, process tools, planning and projects, people leadership, and personal development. You don’t need an expensive MBA or work at a strategy consulting firm; learn all the leadership skills below for free. Start with the high-level guide to the ten leadership categories below the links.

Take on one or two of these skills every week and do the exercises. You will only learn these skills by applying them to your business, interactions, work, and life. There is too much good free stuff never to revisit us. Please bookmark this page, spread the word about Stratechi.com, or follow us on LinkedIn.

Let’s go over what leadership skills you will learn in each section:

Types of Value

Value takes on many forms, and strategic leaders are well-versed in all the different types of value they need to drive. For a business to thrive, employees need to drive customer value better than the competition and, in parallel, develop a sustainable competitive advantage. The output of great strategy is free cash flow and return on invested capital, which is the value investors and shareholders seek. A profit tree is a great framework to understand all the levers at your disposal to drive value in a business. Realizing synergies across a business, where 1+1>2, creates substantial bonus value in a business model. To realize the value in our goals, it always helps to make them SMART Goals. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the diagnostic value metrics of a team, process, function, or business. A balanced scorecard is the highest-level value creation dashboard for a business. Net Promoter is the leading metric to understand if you are creating value for your employees and customers. A strong mission statement serves as the true north, helping employees make decisions and strategies to drive value for the company. Core values ensure interactions are based on the values necessary for the organization to be efficient and effective in driving value. Understanding the various forms of value will make you a better strategic leader.

Market Analysis

Strategic leaders need to understand the competitive dynamics that shape their industry and, hopefully, their strategic decisions. A fundamental understanding of markets and competition is a good starting point. Adoption curves give the broadest context of an industry and its evolution. PESTLE analysis is an excellent multi-dimensional way to understand the implications of macro trends in an industry. Porter’s 5 Forces is a helpful framework to evaluate an industry’s competitive intensity now and in the future. SWOT analysis has its insular weaknesses, but we address how to strengthen the analysis and insights. Game theory can give a strategic leader the upper hand in understanding the potential responses of competitors to different decisions. The Ansoff Growth Matrix can help frame strategic value proposition portfolio options and decisions within the context of a market. The three horizons of growth is useful in framing a business’ multi-year vision and strategic journey.

Problem Solving

At McKinsey, I spent many projects collaboratively problem solving my way to insights and impact. Strategic leaders are masters at problem solving. They prioritize everything within the framing of their goals. They spend the necessary time and mental energy properly defining the problem before trying to solve it. They are hypothesis-driven, always trying to prove or disprove the ideas that shape their strategic thinking. They can quickly disaggregate a problem into its discrete components. Strategic leaders use tools such as hypothesis trees to develop a complete understanding of the problem and solution set. They can switch between deductive and inductive logic, given the nature of the problem they are trying to solve. They understand the power of active listening in nurturing the collaborative problem solving needed to get to elegant solutions. They formulate and ask the right questions to unlock the insights of solid problem solving. They focus on solving the root cause of the problem, not just the symptoms. And strategic leaders understand the most important voice to listen to is that of the customer.

Option Creation

One of the most challenging leadership skills to learn is creating elegant options and solutions to problems and opportunities. This leadership skill makes careers and the best strategic leaders shine. Strategic leaders are strong at innovating out-of-the-box solutions. They leverage emergence to help ideate by tapping into the collective minds of employees, customers, and others. They are attuned to the best practices in their discipline and apply them to elevate the performance of their sphere of influence. They are masters of using analogies to their situation to develop novel solutions. They use the voice of the customer as a well of inspiration and feedback for new ideas, insights, and solutions.

Analytics

Strategic leaders don’t need to be analytic experts, but they do need to be proficient at utilizing and interpreting analysis to make better decisions. Synthesizing data and analysis into prioritized insights is a leadership skill that makes you stand out among the crowd. Transforming data into information into knowledge is the fundamental progression in solid analysis. Ensure you understand the different core data analyses and when to use them. The Pareto principle is one of the most remarkable and prevalent data phenomena. Segmentation analysis is how strategic leaders really get insights to pop from seemingly dull data. Just make sure you understand when and how to normalize data sets so you don’t get insights that aren’t really there. We live in a probabilistic world, and strategic leaders perceive the world and situations better through the lens of probabilities. Modeling is a critical component of making good decisions in seemingly complex situations. Make sure you understand the four parameters of a model. We cover the go-to McKinsey charts and when to use them. We live in a digital world, where experimentation is much easier and often a necessity in the pursuit of optimization. Finally, we cover benchmarking, which is an underutilized analysis of strategy.

Decision Making

Decision-making is one of the most, if not the most, critical leadership skills to master. Rational decision-making is about minimizing emotions and biases and embracing a rational process. Understanding opportunity cost will help you make much better decisions. Cost-benefit analysis is core to many decisions, and knowing the pitfalls and best practices is best. If everyone in a company used a prioritization matrix for all their decisions, the company would be a rocket ship of growth. For multi-variable decisions, use a decision matrix. Often overlooked and undervalued is the decision governance teams can utilize to make better decisions that the team can get behind. Negotiation skills are critical to deriving win-win decisions where multiple parties are involved.

Process Tools

Strategic leaders typically manage processes where they lead a team to transform inputs into outputs. Much of their success is often tied to how effective and efficient they can make those processes, so it’s essential to be proficient in all the process tools and methodologies. Abstracting processes into a process map is always the start of improving a process. Then, it’s about assessing the maturing of a process and driving it to the next level of maturity. Understanding the theory of constraints is fundamental to process improvement. The goal of process improvement is to eliminate the eight forms of waste. Strategic leaders eliminate waste by leveraging the myriad of lean improvement tools, methodologies such as Kaizen or Six Sigma, and automation.

Planning and Projects

Planning and managing projects are fundamental leadership skills. Start by understanding the best practices for creating a work plan or higher-level business roadmap. Strategic leaders are masters at creating and developing high-performance teams. Agile is a lean project methodology that everyone needs to know at some level. Jobs-to-be-Done is a framework for holistically improving almost anything by leveraging the customer’s vantage point. Requirements and use cases are fundamental to designing projects to drive customer value, not just features. Prototyping and piloting are low-risk methods for ensuring the value of a project is improved and realized. Strategic leaders spend much of their time managing project triangles, balancing and trading off the project’s scope, timing, cost, and quality. Reuse is the underutilized secret productivity weapon of great companies. Every strategic leader must master the McKinsey change management model to drive positive change in their teams and organization.

People Leadership

People leadership is where every strategic leader needs to shine. It is all about raising your team’s individual and collective potential while supporting them to realize their potential. It all starts with ensuring you have the right people in the right roles. Then, do you have the right leadership mindset. Next, people leadership is about creating clear accountabilities and high expectations and ensuring you delegate to and empower them. The will skill matrix is a simple way to define high performers while providing a framework to improve others to become high performers. Myers Briggs helps you navigate the personality dynamics that often trip up people leaders. If you can create and infuse strong norms into meetings, your team will thank you and be much more productive. Reducing complexity is an underappreciated lever in improving the performance of a team and organization. In the end, organizational performance is about execution, so learn the best practices to make sure your team has effective and efficient execution. Tapping into crowdsourcing is a fantastic way to increase your organization’s capacity at minimal additional cost. And if you have to right-size a team, ensure you know the best practices.

Personal Development

Your personal development will elevate your ability to learn and apply leadership skills. Start with the seven habits of highly effective people. You have seven sources of power; know when and how to wield them. Immersing yourself on the frontlines is one of the best ways to learn and evoke positive change. We can all improve communication, which will pay dividends over your career. You build your intuition over time; the better your gut is in sensing situations, the better you can navigate them. Building consensus with others on your ideas is an underutilized influencing and relationship skill. Developing and acting on your personal growth strategy will give you the intentionality and game plan to accelerate your leadership development. Good strategic leaders are calm, present, and balanced in their lives. No matter where you are in your career, it is always good to build and execute 100-day plans.