3 Critical Interpersonal Skills Of Successful Leaders

Lack of belief can affect skills

I often wonder if people think interpersonal skills are an unchangeable character trait that they have to live with.   Ineffective traits are particularly damaging when they affect the leader’s interpersonal skills. We then have to ask ourselves why we appoint leaders without well-honed interpersonal skills.  The personality, or character traits, of leaders, can be viewed as impossible to change.  After all, if the leader is born with those traits, they may not change them.  Believing that a trait is fixed limits our chances to make changes.  As a result, interpersonal skills aren’t given the priority they should in organisations.

Specialism or expediency

There are several reasons we employ leaders who don’t have appropriate interpersonal skills.   Sometimes it’s because the leader was an expert in their specialism. Other times there’s been a re-organisation, and there was nowhere else for existing people to go. Alternatively, leaders have been in the position for a long time, and it’s easier to maintain the status quo.

To be truly effective, leaders should have the skills needed to do the job and make a difference. Recruiting or maintaining roles where leaders don’t have the right interpersonal skills isn’t inherently wrong. Doing nothing about it, though, is simply neglectful.

Lack of vision

In Research reported by John Tierney in the New York Times, it was shown that generally, people don’t believe they will change.  This belief is adopted because of either a lack of vision of what the future might hold or from an over-optimistic self-concept that they are the best they are right now.

If your leaders don’t have the right interpersonal skills, some soft skills development is needed.

In my journey from a junior leader many years ago, I have changed so much that it’s scary. I look back at those early days, and it’s hard to believe it’s the same life. What I did learn on the way is that interpersonal skills can and should be developed and prioritised in any organization.

The most significant changes came when I learned and used the following three interpersonal skills. These were hard lessons for me and the ones I had to learn because, frankly, my default position didn’t get the results I wanted, which was a happy, motivated and inspired team.

1. Anticipating How People Might Feel

I see it all around me, and I still am guilty of lacking this particular interpersonal skill sometimes. Awareness is no guarantee of change; you must practice hard to change long-formed habits.

As leaders, we can be so busy getting things done. Sometimes as people, we get so caught up in our own stories we forget our impact on others. As parents, we are so busy protecting our children; that we forget we can inadvertently invoke feelings of “wrongness”.    When we feel justified communicating with a lack of concern for others on the receiving end of what we say, we have lost this skill.  We have lost this skill when we react with anger to someone who has said something in all innocence. Finally, when we are fearful, impatient, annoyed, or just being thoughtless, we can communicate in a way that dishonours others.

Although some of the characteristics of what we commonly call empathy are in play here, empathy tends to respond to others and how they feel already. This interpersonal skill is about our impact on others.

2. Owning Your Truth

We make all sorts of stories and assumptions in our minds about what we see out there. A team leader badged someone as lazy as she wasn’t performing well. I asked him how he had come to that conclusion.  He told me it was because she didn’t put as much effort in as others. Well, factually, that might have been true, but it didn’t necessarily follow that the employee was lazy. Recently, a teacher who didn’t know my son’s background concluded he was lazy.   The reason for this is that he hadn’t done the work he needed to do in a particular subject.  As a result, she had drawn her conclusion about him because she hadn’t asked him what the problem was.

If the employee doesn’t come to work, is unhappy, doesn’t work hard enough, works 24/7 or always volunteers. We make judgments about them. “They don’t care”, “aren’t engaged”, or they are our “life-savers”, or “paragons of virtue”.

The truth is, and the fact we need to own is that we are constantly gathering information, and when we interpret the data, it becomes our next instalment.

Owning your truth starts with saying. “I can see that this is/isn’t being done. Why is that?” or “I feel furious, and I need to understand why I can’t deal with this poor performance in an emotionally free, assertive way.

3. Seeing through Multi-faceted Perceptions

Everyone sees things differently. Even when you think you have reached the most watertight and consensual decision: There will be somewhere a slight difference in perception.

Developing the skills to see things from many different perspectives can be powerful and effective. To do this easily, an understanding of personality types and the characteristics of each type is helpful. Once you get good at this, the first two interpersonal skills mentioned above become clearer and more challenging to avoid.

The truth is, we never know what anyone else is thinking.  Their reasons for doing (or not doing) anything, their preferences, or why we might disagree. All we can do is try to see a situation from as many perspectives as possible. Of course, De Bono’s “6 Thinking Hats” is a version of this.  Unfortunately, often the concept can be confined to the boardroom when the skill is helpful in most situations.

Further Interpersonal Skills

Interpersonal skills are critical for effective leadership, they enable leaders to guide their teams towards achieving organizational goals, while also fostering a positive and productive work environment. As well as my specific experiential view on those skills, here are some further interpersonal skills some of which were identified by the Centre for Creative Leadership and Harvard Business Review.