What are the Core Leadership and Management Skills?

Today many organizations are failing to achieve their full potential due to the managerial shortcomings and a lack of strategic thinking and implementation.

It is clear that we have to overcome these weaknesses and improve our leadership and management capabilities. This is increasingly necessary to create a culture where companies have the ambition, confidence, resilience and skills to respond to the current economical challenges and compete successfully both locally and globally.

We are living in a highly competitive business world. The local and global competition is increasing.

Some companies are failing and some others are generating profit and growth. If we look at the Fortune 500 list, we can see that some of them failed and some of them survived and grew. There are also new companies that are listed in over 1955 due to the changes in technology, products, services, lifestyle, culture, customer needs and urbanization.

When I look at the business world, innovation opportunities in growth and profitability for companies will come from the fields of climate/energy, health/nutrition, mobility, security and communication by using high technologies.

These high technologies, successful leadership and good education and training are the drivers of strategic marketing and innovation and also new products, processes and services in the global business world to have high competition power. Of course service and technological innovations should be linked to create success.

I have worked in pharmaceutical and food industries more than 28 years. During this period I worked with different leaders/managers. I have effectively managed factory start ups, organizational structuring, marketing, sales, production operations, supply, controlled agricultural production, quality, R&D, new product development, regulatory management, exporting, importing, and communication with external companies, government agencies, associations and others. All of these provided my achieving strong experience, know-how and excellent skills to creating excellence in business.

In today’s business world people want their leaders to be visible, consistent, inspiring, authentic, clear, engaging, communicating regularly and freely, and managing performance in a fair and balanced manner, human, demonstrating humility, understanding and strength in their endeavours to lead a high-achieving and competent business.

I know that the core leadership and management skills are crucial for achieving a high performance and competent business. These are;

1- Providing effective leadership
2- Strategy and planning
3- People management
4- Budgeting and financial planning
5- Risk management
6- Fostering innovation and creativity
7- Partnership working with other organizations and networking

Now I want to share top leadership competencies and what they do to create growth, profitability, competitive advantage and high customer value in the company with you according to my experience and know-how. These are;

1- Strong experience, knowledge and personal skills including high emotional intelligence.

2- The ability to create a high candor effect in the organization, collaborators, and customers.

3- Strong authentic leadership skills.

4- Making competitive intelligence on the regular basis.

5- Making long-term sector analysis and if necessary making healthy disengagements.

6- Creating operational excellence and organizational agility and also implementing alignment within the organization.

7- Removing shoddy leaders/managers from the organization and hiring and working with the top skilled people.

8- Managing a true talent policy. Training and developing people on the regular basis.

9- Applying long-termism as a business policy.

10- Developing and implementing a marketing and innovation strategy. It contains short and long-term competitive and systematic marketing and innovation development and implementation strategy.

11- Establishing an innovation department, strong R&D and customer immersion lab and encouraging and nurturing disruptive individuals also.

12- Effectively financing innovation activities. For example top 20 spenders for innovation are spending 8.3% (average value) of their annual sales to R&D. Global innovation 1000 companies had $17.7 trillion in sales in 2013.

13- Creating openness to new ideas from competitors, customers, collaborators, suppliers, other industries and their company.

14- Applying effective quality management and regulatory policy.

15- Considering social and environmental impacts of their products and services.

16- Being faster than competitors.

17- Having high level qualities such as inspiring, integrity, thoughtful, supportive, resilience, collaborative, effective communication, and courage.

18- Building a committed, enthusiastic and proud workforce.

19- Developing and implementing right marketing strategy with tactics. Focusing on product, service, brand, price, incentives, communication and distribution.

20- Defining the ways of changing the playing field through an acquisition, a new product, a new service and/or globalization.

Finally I want to say that hiring and working with truly effective leaders/managers will create a dynamic, aligned and innovative organization that looks at business through a customer’s eyes to achieve a competitive value, sustainable growth, profitability and competitive advantage.

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