How to Become an Effective Leader: 10 Soft Skills to Cultivate

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Here’s a hard truth: people aren’t born leaders. Sure, they may grow some skills more naturally or quickly than others, but that doesn’t automatically make someone capable of leading a team to success. Leaders are made; not born. This is fantastic news, because it opens the door to many more people developing the skills needed to become effective leaders.  

What are the skills needed to become a strong leader? How does one go about developing or strengthening those skills? We’ve placed a lot of employees over the years and believe we know a thing or two about what qualities can help someone be successful as a manager, supervisor, or even an executive.  

While industry specific skills are always important, it’s often the so-called “soft skills” that make the difference between a leader that encourages and communicates well with their team, and one that demoralizes and casts blame. Here are 10 soft skills that anyone can learn, and that can pave the way to becoming a strong, effective, and successful leader – in any industry. 

1. Communication 

Leaders have to be able to communicate well with a diverse set of people: other leaders and managers, new employees and tenured ones, even partners and clients. Leaders must utilize strong communication skills daily, so it pays to be consistently working on this skill. 

What makes a good communicator? It starts with listening. If you aren’t actively listening to the conversation, you might miss something that is only implied. Watching body language and understanding how people react is part of active listening.  

On the vocal side of communication is clarity, conciseness, and limiting how much you say. That’s right – sometimes the best way to communicate confidently is to not say anything at all. Give all the members of your team the opportunity to be heard and encourage those that hold back to speak their thoughts. You can’t hear what isn’t said and could be missing out on some enlightening perspectives. 

2. Public Speaking 

You might be thinking: “I don’t do public speaking in my role!”, but you’d be wrong! Public speaking isn’t just speaking at events to huge crowds. it’s speaking to any group of people in public. The same skills that would allow you to confidently address a large group of people translate to communicating to a smaller group (or team) as well.  

Fear of public speaking is the most common fear or phobia there is. An estimated 73% of the population is afraid of public speaking! Fears and anxiety range from mild nervousness to paralyzing terror. Exposure therapy and practice are a great way to overcome this anxiety. While the nervousness around public speaking may never completely go away (even celebrities and professional athletes get nervous before big events!), you can mitigate the effects of your fear and still become a good – or even great – public speaker. 

A big part of this particular anxiety is the fear of standing in front of a crowd, silent, at a loss for what to say. Getting comfortable with silence, pauses, and the discomfort of not being perfect are all great ways to help get over this fear. As they say: practice makes perfect. Start slowly and take every opportunity that comes your way to practice speaking to groups. Lead a meeting at work with your immediate team, cultivate a practice group with friends or family, or join a local group like Toastmasters to get even more practice. With time, your anxiety will decrease, and you’ll have an in-demand skill that few people cultivate, that will catapult you to becoming a better leader. 

3. Humility 

One of the most important traits you can learn is humility. Everyone has dealt with a leader who let their power get to their head, who had a massive ego, or refused to admit when they were wrong. This type of leader drives away good employees and can be a huge expense for the company. If your ego increases turnover, you’re costing your company thousands of dollars.  

Everyone gets it wrong some of the time. When you do, admit it. Ask for feedback often and implement it when necessary. Don’t let status come between you and improvement - everyone has room to grow. Hold yourself accountable for your missteps and you’ll only grow from the experience.  

4. Emotional Control 

There’s nothing wrong with being excited, being passionate, or communicating your emotions to your team. However, there is a time and a place to do so. As a leader you can’t have a temper or react impulsively because you are angry or sad, and you should never, ever yell; it's unprofessional and rude. If you’re having a bad day personally or professionally, telling your team that you aren’t at your best is perfectly okay, but bringing that anger to your interactions isn’t. It’s not your team’s fault, and even if it is, they deserve to be heard and respected before suffering any consequences.  

Respect your team members by controlling your emotions and giving them the chance to speak for themselves. If your circumstances are such that that level of control is not possible, give yourself a break and take a step back from your duties as a leader. 

5. Confidence 

Have you ever had a manager that hemmed and hawed and second guessed themselves at every opportunity? This behavior makes it hard to respect their decisions, and employees often undermine the managers authority.  

A good leader is confident in their decisions and commits to seeing them through. When things go wrong, they’ll accept accountability (see #3 above), but they don’t dwell. Stuff happens, and after it’s dealt with it’s time to move on.  

Be decisive in your actions and act with confidence and authority, while being humble and flexible, and you’ll do great. 

6. Delegation 

PSA: you can’t do everything. Even if you are the best at something, you can’t afford to spend all your time on one project. It’s imperative that you learn to delegate responsibly. You have a team for a reason, and they can’t learn and grow if they aren’t given the opportunity to fail. If someone else can do something 75% as well as you can, delegate it!  

Delegating well frees up your time to be a good manager and gives you the bandwidth to devote to the things that truly need your leadership and expertise. 

7. Critical Thinking 

Critical thinking skills can be difficult to learn and take practice to build. Critical thinking is defined as “the process of analyzing information in order to make a logical decision”. Put another way: critical thinking is the ability to take the information you have and extrapolate solutions.  You will rarely come to the “right” solution right away, but that’s the whole point of the process. By generating solutions to problems, you’re strengthening your problem-solving skills and giving your future-self more options, and the ability to discover more options.  

Some good ways to hone your problem-solving skills are to ask more questions, question what you think you know, or to work backwards from the problem to the source in order to find a better solution.  

8. Flexibility 

If you can pivot on a dime when something goes wrong, that’s flexibility. If instead you get flustered and upset and stick to your tried-and-true methods, you might need to work on your professional adaptability.  

Things change rapidly, especially in a world as digital and connected as ours is now. We all saw that firsthand in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Businesses, including leaders and employees, had to be flexible and adapt quickly to the unknown. We didn’t know what was coming next, or what the future held, but the companies that came out of the pandemic successfully were the ones that were flexible enough to evolve as needed. Sometimes, you’ll need to be that figurehead of flexibility and adaptability, and help your team evolve with the changing circumstances.  

9. Tact 

Some people describe tact as the ability to tell someone they are awful and be thanked for it. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it has a grain of truth. There will be times in your career when you will need to deliver honest or upsetting news: a layoff or termination, a lost client or deal, and the more tact you’ve cultivated, the easier it can be for your team or employee to absorb this bad news.  

Tact is especially important when the need to discipline or terminate a direct report arises. These are delicate situations that call for empathy, kindness, and honest interactions. Developing your tact skill will give you the ability and confidence to get through these difficult situations without causing undue stress or hurt to others. 

10. Giving Effective Feedback 

Using all of the above skills together will enable you to give effective and tactful feedback, which might be considered the most important role of a leader. 

Your employees cannot grow and improve without proper feedback. Feedback can be delivered with tact, humility, confidence and emotional control, or it can be unstructured, hurtful, and cast blame. You must balance honesty with empathy, room for improvement with areas of success, and humility with confidence. It’s difficult to give effective feedback and it takes practice.  

Perhaps the best way to practice giving worthwhile feedback is, surprisingly, asking for it. Asking for feedback on how you are managing, leading, and providing guidance, gives you a unique opportunity to dissect that feedback yourself. What made you feel good? What made you want to improve, or conversely, feel upset and unappreciated? Use this insight to deliver better feedback yourself; feedback that will get results, instead of causing more problems.  

You can learn to be an effective and successful leader by working to adopt these 10 soft skills. If you consider some of these current weaknesses, that’s great, because it means you have room for improvement. We offer a great course on leadership development to help employees become better, more effective team leaders. Remember: great leaders are made, not born!