What do leaders lead? They lead teams; they lead organizations, but above all they lead people. And effective leadership of people, of human beings, requires leaders to develop human skills if they are to engage effectively with their team, their peers and their manager.

They need to be able to communicate, to collaborate, to lead, to adapt, to show resilience… the list goes on. Often, these are called “soft skills”, but the name is misleading: There is nothing soft or fluffy about the ability to engage with others in an effective way. Human skills directly impact on a leader’s ability to motivate, inspire and guide their teams.

Developing human skills can be especially important for leaders who have come from a background or role where their person-to-person interaction was seen as less important than their technical expertise, knowledge or skill.

The Importance of Self-Awareness

How can you develop human skills in leaders? The temptation may be to send them on a succession of specific training programs — in communication or negotiation skills, for example. While these programs will have some impact, it may be limited, and the results may be transitory. Research shows that self-awareness predicts leadership performance, and so the best first step is for leaders to develop self-awareness to understand themselves and their personality. By understanding how they are different from the people they work with or manage, leaders can adapt their style to communicate more effectively, deal with conflict, manage team dynamics and improve team performance.

One of the most effective ways to increase self-awareness is to use personality questionnaires, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) assessment. The MBTI framework measures four aspects of personality:

• Extraversion-Introversion: Does a leader prefer to focus their attention on the outside world of people and things (Extraversion, E), or on their inner world of thoughts and feelings (Introversion, I)?
• Sensing-Intuition: Do they prefer and trust information that is practical, realistic and based on the evidence of their five senses (Sensing, S) or do they prefer to look at connections, the big picture, and future trends (Intuition, N)?
• Thinking-Feeling: Do they prefer to make decisions based on objective logic (Thinking, T) or based on their values, and on how people will be affected by the decision (Feeling, F)?
• Judging-Perceiving: Do they prefer to live in a structured, organized, planned way (Judging, J), or in a more spontaneous, emergent way (Perceiving, P)?

These four personality preferences combine together dynamically to give an overall personality type. For example, if a leader has preferences for Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking and Judging, their overall type will be ESTJ. Each type has unique strengths and weaknesses, and no type is inherently better or worse than another. The key is for leaders to recognize their type and how it influences their behavior and interactions with others.

Other tools can also be effective, such as mentoring, coaching and feedback from others, whether this is formalized as 360-degree feedback, or as more informal feedback from peers, mentors and team members. Self-reflection on past successes and failures can also provide valuable insights and, allied to the self-knowledge and the structure given by personality assessments, it can help leaders to understand how their actions affect others and what they can do differently in the future.

However it is achieved, self-awareness is the first step in developing human skills.

Using Self-Awareness to Develop Human Skills

Self-awareness, and the resulting awareness of other people’s personalities, sets the context for developing human skills. Take communication skills, for example. Knowing their personality type, and then of their team, can help a leader to understand both their default communication style and that of their team members. This knowledge means that they can flex and adapt their style to land effectively with their audience. For example, leaders with personality preferences for Intuition and Thinking will naturally tend to talk about the big picture, future possibilities, and the logical implications of all this, but a team member with preferences for Sensing and Feeling will want to know about exactly how they and their colleagues will be affected on a personal level. Communication with this focus will be more effective and persuasive.

Regardless of their personality type, all leaders can also benefit from honing their listening skills. This involves not only hearing words but also understanding the underlying emotions and motivations. It helps in building trust and rapport with team members. Understanding that other people may genuinely be coming from a different place, a key aspect of self-awareness, is crucial in building this skill.

Understanding Differences

Tools like the MBTI assessment help leaders understand that other people are different and that this can be useful, and give them a framework for understanding these differences. This can supercharge a leader’s human skills. It allows them to promote diversity of thought, creating an environment where different perspectives are listed to and acted on. Leaders can encourage team members to share their ideas and viewpoints, ensuring that the team benefits from a wide range of insights. In this way, they can avoid groupthink and costly mistakes.

Leaders can navigate conflicts by recognizing that different types may approach problems in diverse ways. They can mediate by finding common ground and helping team members understand each other’s perspectives, squaring the circle between those pushing for an immediate solution and those wanting to collect more information.

Beyond Self-Awareness

Of course, self-awareness and the motivation to change are not in themselves the only human skills development that a leader will need. But by developing self-awareness, they can much better identify where their skills gaps lie, and then look for specific training and development activities.

A one-size-fits-all approach will not yield large dividends in leadership development. A focused, personalized program will.