Leadership Core Competencies are the Foundation of Leadership Skills

Leadership core competencies serve as the foundation for developing leadership skills. 

Leadership competencies are kind of like a company’s vision statement, mission statement or values—Unless you have those competencies defined, what you train your managers for or what you’re building is going to be hit or miss. 

When you have your leadership core competencies defined, you really have a much stronger map as to what direction you need to head in. You can evaluate your managers on where they stand in each of those given competencies, and that’s going to give you a priority list in terms of what you need to work on with your managers and in what order. 

There are four “buckets” I tend to split manager roles into: Inspirer, Manager, Teacher and Champion. 

Here’s a list of competencies I see falling under each of these: 

• Inspirer—motivation, employee recognition and creating a positive work environment.
• Manager—ability to time manage and project manage, decision-making ability, knowing how to set expectations. This is more of the administrative role.
• Teacher—ability to drive communication, listening skills and coaching skills.
• Champion—team-building and trust-building abilities. 

A common mistake I see employers make is, a lot of times they are focused on the analytical skills that fall under the manager bucket. I see the core competencies often being defined as the analysis of employee skills, decision-making skills, time and project management skills.

These skills are important, but when you leave the other skills out of your core competencies, particularly coaching skills and championing skills, that’s when you start to run into issues.

The managerial/administrative skills are important. They can drive a business, but they can’t retain talent. They can’t develop talent. And the cost of turnover for a company—having to find and train new people, having untapped talent that goes elsewhere to get developed—these are things that will hurt you in the long-run. 

So even though you’re driving your business appropriately, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re up-to-speed in where your leadership needs to be competency-wise. 

Focusing only on administrative tasks, while ignoring other important competencies, can be a costly mistake. 

In my next Insight, I’ll explain some steps you can take to start effectively training your leadership on important core competencies. 

Leadership core competencies serve as the foundation for developing leadership skills.