The House of Leadership - Skills versus Characteristics
The room called skills is different from the room called characteristics.
We know that people bring to the workplace a variety of technical skills like keyboarding, operating a forklift, bookkeeping, and even closing sales. Yet in this room called skills we want to examine leadership skills, not technical skills.
Delegating is perhaps the easiest leadership skill to identify. And once a leader “gets-it” that delegating is a skill then it becomes easier to identify other leadership skills like visioning, coaching, strategic planning, resolving conflict, etc.
Why is keyboarding a skill? Why is delegating a skill?
The short answer is that any skill has, at least, two things in common:
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A body of knowledge that can be learned and/or taught, and
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Practice
Just imagine paying a tutor to teach you the body of knowledge about keyboarding but never practicing it. What would you get? Probably two finger typing
Just imagine an executive coach teaching you the body of knowledge about delegating but never practicing it. What would you get? Probably micromanagement. And that, by the way, is a characteristic!
Tags: delegating, House of Leadership, leadership characteristics, leadership skills, micromanagement, micromanaging, technical skills
