Basic Leadership Assessment You Can Perform Yourself

We recommend giving yourself this leadership assessment periodically to see where you are, and what you need to work on in order to improve your leadership skills. The job of being a leader is never something that you are fully trained for. The best leaders continuously improve their skills and this leadership assessment will help you improve yourself.

First, look at your leadership skills. You want to take some time to decide what you think are the most important skills for being a leader. You then want to perform a leadership assessment on someone whom you admire heavily. This could be your boss, or even your boss’s boss, or even an employee of a completely different company. Who it is does not matter so much. List everything that they do as a leader that you admire. You want to be as detailed as possible so that you can study this later. Once you have finished this, select another person. Preferably someone whom you dislike as a leader, that has horrible leadership skills in your opinion. Perform the leadership assessment on them as well.

Once you are done with those you want to assess your own skills as a leader. Use a scale of 1 to 5, with 0 showing no skills at all in that area, and 5 showing that you have perfected the trait. We recommend performing this at least once a year, if not more often so that you can continuously work on improving your leadership skills.

Secondly, determine your primary leadership style. There are three different leadership styles and you should be comfortable using all three. They each have their benefits and they each have their disadvantages. The first leadership style is the directive approach. This means that you give your employees or team direct, specific instructions that you want followed exactly. The second is the consultative approach. This means that you give your team a task and work with them to create the finished product or solution. The third approach is the free rein approach. This means that your team is free to do as they please within reason, which can result in either chaos, or an extreme burst of creativity.

You should practice your skills in all three areas since some are more appropriate at times than others. Never use only one approach; this can create problems if you are not using the other styles as you should.

Step three of the leadership assessment is to determine exactly what your leadership legacy is. This means, what are you doing as a leader that will be remembered in your company or field of expertise? If you are not doing anything then you should begin working on a plan to change that. You should never just simply show up for work, your goal should be to always improve and become the best leader possible. You should revamp your leadership training plans so that you can work on casting a positive leadership legacy.

Use the time each year you spend doing your leadership assessment to ensure that you are improving each year. Every year you should notice some improvement, and each year you should find new areas where you need to work to improve. Remember, this is a lifelong process that never ends. Also, because a leadership assessment is such an important tool we recommend you always do them at least once a year, if you are working very hard towards improvement you can always perform a leadership assessment every 6 months instead.

By: Alex Giocinti

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Alex Giocinti offers a free 7 day ecourse called Ways To Make Others Believe In You. It includes several simple tips and tricks you can use to be more influential and persuasive with people, increase your leadership ability and help you grow your business. ===> Click the link www.discoverthesuccessprocess.com today to sign up today to learn how to get the prestige and respect you deserve. <===