Defining the skills you need to be successful can help you set goals for leadership development and find the right coach who can guide you as you achieve them.

Technical Skills Only Get You So Far

Great leaders have deep technical expertise and broad knowledge of how their industry and products work. Your technical skills can help you decide on a strategy of where you want to go. However, great technical skills only get you so far. You need to add the leadership and emotional intelligence piece to get the rest of the way.

Leadership skills are the same regardless of your role or industry because people are the same everywhere. You need leadership skills to inspire a whole team to execute on strategy, stay aligned and focused on a common purpose. Getting people to follow your lead is the essence of leadership.

So, in this article, I examine how we know what successful leadership looks like, and what are the leadership skills that show up consistently in great leaders. It should help you identify the skills you want to develop to be a better leader.

It’s Easy to Make False Assumptions about Success

Many people make false assumptions about what makes people successful. Here are some of the theories we used to think were effective for leadership, but research has shown most of these either don’t work or actually reduce results:

  • Intelligence: We used to think “the best and the brightest” would be most successful. Sure, smarts are important in business, but alone, it does not drive success. Research and experience show that smart people fail all the time and the syndrome of having to be smartest person in the room is actually disruptive.
  • Personality traits were at one point associated with success and a lot of assessments were built to find them. But this theory has not held up to research either.
  • Fear: Some people used to think that fear was a driver of success, and unfortunately, some people still do. However research shows that fear gets at best a little compliance. A lack of psychological safety at work has been shown to reduce organizational results.
  • The Peter Principle: This is the idea that people get promoted to their “level of incompetence.” However, research has shown that this theory to inconsistent with data.
  • Imitate someone successful: Some highly successful coaches like Marshall Goldsmith or Tony Robbins, have eadership development programs that you can join, usually for $3000 to $20,000 or more. Most of these programs measure success in terms of how many people buy their courses, not how well their customers do.

So, going with your gut on this question is likely to lead to biases. To get a real answer about which skills you need to be successful, it’s best to find some data to back it up.

Research on the Skills You Need to Be Successful

For more than half a century, researchers have studied what skills you need to be successful. Research on that question is plentiful and has even created its own branch of academic research: organizational science.

Ample evidence shows that there are two skillsets that people need to be successful in business:

  1. Leadership skills
  2. Emotional intelligence

Leadership is the same whether you are a CEO or a first-time manager, whether you’re in sales, IT, the sciences, or any other industry. Effective leaders consistently are those who know how to rally a team around a common purpose or cause, which is the goal of leadership. Those who are really tuned into how the people around them are feeling and can use emotions strategically to get others on board are the best of the best. That’s why leadership skills are, by and large, emotional intelligence skills.

Still, just saying you need leadership skills and emotional intelligence isn’t going to get most people very far. These are broad categories.

Every leadership book and program will give you a list of skills you need to be successful. It can be overwhelming to figure out where to start. To make it more difficult, different people have different names for essentially the same skills. Below, I’m going to look at the skills you need to be successful that seem to show up on everyone’s list and use common sense.

The Skills You Need to be Successful

The leadership skills listed below include a short definition for each skill. All of these skills are worthy of study and consideration on their own. This is a quick overview.

Inspires Trust

Without trust, no leader succeeds. Fear can get you only so far, and no further. Trust is the very basis for human connection. I can talk about this at length, and I have. This is why authenticity in leadership is important, because people sense it when you are being fake. And this is why people who use fear, intimidation, or a command-and-control leadership style get lower results than people who build trust.

Inspiring trust is fundamental to establishing psychological safety in the office. Most learning is trial-and-error learning. So, in order to learn, team members need to trust that they can take risks without reprisal. Without this foundational trust, learning is stifled and in its place, anxiety, apathy, or avoidance grow.

For more information on this essential topic, I recommend:

In short, the research is clear: leadership based on trust gets the best results in a workplace.

Demonstrates Confidence

You can call it confidence, leadership presence, self-regard, or any other name, but as Shakespeare said, by any other name it smells as sweet. Personally, I like to call it self-regard, which is a measurable emotional intelligence skill meaning accepting yourself fully—the good, the bad, and everything in between. If you truly accept yourself authentically, you stop getting triggered into a stress response (fight, flight, or freeze) any time someone gets close to the things you don’t accept about yourself. When you develop self-regard, you can stand up for your values and beliefs even when others try to bend your will. That’s true confidence and everyone likes it when they see it.

Earns Respect

Knowing how to earn respect is among the essential skills you need to be successful. People don’t follow you unless they respect you.

It’s worth pointing out that respect is always mutual. That is, if you respect others, they will usually respect you. If you don’t respect them, don’t expect them to respect you. So earning respect starts by respecting others.

Furthermore, respect is closely associated with motivation. When people don’t feel respected, they lose interest quickly. So, the ability to earn mutual respect with others is an essential skill.

Certain behaviors have proven to demonstrate respect, and will usually result in earning respect as well. These include:

  • Listening: Listening is the most important sign of respect. Watch masterful leaders and you will see they listen more than they talk.
  • Avoiding judgment: Being judgmental always implies superiority and inferiority. It is impossible to respect someone if you are talking down to them.
  • Empathy: To demonstrate respect, you have to show that you understand what it’s like to be in their position. I highly recommend Validation by Caroline Fleck if you want to learn more and see the research on this powerful skill.
  • Assertiveness: As an emotional intelligence skill, assertiveness is the ability to hold your rights equally as others. To maintain respect, leaders hold everyone’s values and rights as equally important and work hard and creatively to find ways to respect all stakeholders.
  • Self-management: Good leaders are aware of and control their passions or desires. They temper their impulses toward anger and aggression. They let their passions show strategically to inspire others. If you are going to manage and respect others, the first rule is to manage your own emotions first.

For more, I highly recommend Bob Chapman’s book, Everybody Matters. It’s an incredible story of how he turned respect for everyone into a business philosophy that helped him expand his business model and achieve incredible success.

Negotiates Alignment

Negotiation is essential for leaders. Negotiating for alignment is equally so because leaders don’t execute by themselves. Most importantly, leaders need to align purpose and performance standards to inspire excellence on their teams. They need others to align with the strategy to execute properly. Again, there is voluminous research on this that I won’t go into here. Needless to say, negotiating alignment is one of the key skills you need to be successful.

For more on negotiation, see

Makes Quality Decisions

Leaders live and die by the quality of their decisions. Making a decision and owning it is a key part of what it means to lead. Again, there are lot of skills that go into decision making. From experience we all know that, however hard we try to be rational, emotions often get in the way of good decisions. From the perspective of emotional intelligence, decision making is a composite of three skills: flexibility, impulse control, and reality testing, all of which we can measure and learn to improve.

High quality decisions come from good information, so being able to gather information from your team is also essential. As leaders rise up, they get farther away from new technologies and conditions on the front line where customers experience their service or product. Good leaders stay in touch regarding the day-to-day situations their team members are facing. Decisions are only as good as the information they are based on, so leaders who are good at gathering information and listening generally make better decisions.

For more, see:

What These Skills Mean for You

As a recap, here is a quick list of the skills you need to succeed as a leader:

  • Inspires Trust
  • Demonstrates Confidence
  • Earns Respect through
    • Listening
    • Avoiding judgment
    • Empathy
    • Assertiveness
    • Self-management
  • Negotiates Alignment
  • Makes Quality Decisions

If you want to rise up in your career, all of these skills will serve you well. Any time devoted to developing them will be useful to you. You can certainly learn them on your own, if you have the time to study them and the safety to try them out as you develop them.  

A coach can help you learn these skills more quickly and avoid the worst mistakes people make in trial-and-error learning. You’ll want to look for someone who has an understanding of the research as well someone who has personal success as well, applying the skills needed in real time and proving some effectiveness.

Further Reading

Now you know about the skills you need to be successful. You might be thinking about which skills you want to develop with a coach. Next, you might want to look at the following blogs:

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