Effective Leadership Skills By Lamin Mai TouraY Department of water resources Banjul, the Gambia

Presentation outline Introduction Roles and Responsibilities of a Leader in a Team What can make an effective leadership Skills?    9 Effective Leadership characteristics to help your Team Member Conclusion

Introduction Effective leadership skills is about managing or handling others especially your subordinates who report to you. In effective leadership skills you need to aspire to preserve a leadership role to be come successfully. Effective leadership and management skills is about influencing and motivating others to achieve the goals and objectives assigned to your team

Introduction Cont’d You start with yourself, you need to understand your responsibilities and what it take to lead a team. Effective leadership and management skills, you need to make a better choice not for yourself but for your team and its betterment. Effective leadership involves continuously working on yourself as a leader to become an effective self made leader.

Roles and Responsibilities of a Leader in a Team A leader in a team is task with roles and responsibilities and helping the team serving to grow successfully. On the other hand, a effective leadership is someone who has the ability to create and sustaining the organization and to remain to in the market place. Effective leadership skills can be sharpened with the help of practice and exchange of ideas within and outside the team. Furthermore, in effective leadership both the leader and the team members can influence and motivate each other in achieving their set targets.

What can make an effective leadership Skills? The 1st most important requirement of becoming an effective leadership is commitment from a person who has actually made time in their career for their organizations. It is a combination of the effective leadership skills of the person along with his knowledge, his values, and his skills. According to effective leadership qualities, it is very important to know your own abilities, skills, your knowledge and your values and how do people reciprocate to you. Along with abilities and skills the leader must have an eye of recognizing and valuing strength, weaknesses, and abilities of his team members as individuals and also as a team.

9 Effective Leadership characteristics to help your Team Member Knowledge power 2. Roles and responsibilities 3. Work with your team 4. Know your team members 5. Take up challenges       6. Take risk 7. Recognize and encourage 8. Have a positive and a problem-solving approach 9. Listen to your subordinates         

1. Knowledge power This is the 1st traits of effective leadership and the most important thing you need to have. Get yourself to go through the product knowledge, policies and procedures; as knowledge will help you deal with difficult situations and a guiding tool. By having good and required knowledge you can be prepared for unforeseen situations, which is your responsibility.

2. Roles and responsibilities Get to know your roles and responsibilities well before you start performing as a leader. Knowing your roles and responsibility does not just restrict you to them, knowing them helps you understand your job and your profile better, however taking up additional responsibilities is always beneficial for you and your learning process.

3. Work with your team Being a leader you are still a part of the team. As a leader you have to behave like a team member by working with the team, helping them solve their issues, coordinating between teams to make sure you get the best solution at all times. You have to help your team with your technical knowledge, emotional support and vision to help them perform as per the your Department/Agency standards. You have to insist on the support of the team by using the words ‘WE’ and not ‘I’ as I alone will not be able to meet up to the expectations of the organization.

4. Know your team members Know each individual not just professionally but also somewhat personally simply in order to connect well as a leader. When you know them professionally you will get to know their specialization, what they are good at and what they are not good at. If you know their weaknesses coach them and train them in order to overcome their weaknesses to help them have knowledge of all business domains the team has been performing. Knowing your team well helps you during difficult situations which member of yours can help you out of it.

5. Take up challenges       Taking up challenging situations and helping by resolving them is a very good way of learning something new for you and the team and also proving your worth to the management. To come into a position of taking challenges you need to have a very strong team in terms of knowledge, ability, willingness, and commitment towards the organization and their job roles.

6. Take risk Taking risk is coming up with new ideas and initiating them. An effective leadership can give ideas and implement them or can take suggestions and ideas from his team members. The ideas do not need to come only from an individual they can also come from a community. However, recognizing good ideas and initiating them is the job and the responsibility of the leader. Leaders should be people who are willing to step out into the unknown as the unknown work with the help of his experience, knowledge, ability, and confidence.

7. Recognize and encourage Encouragement and motivation are very important for our lives. And if an employee gets it at his workplace nothing is more encouraging for him/her. Traits of effective leadership recognizing the efforts of your subordinate is extremely important and motivating them to keep the good work up and do even better keep their spirits up and running. Make sure you recognize their efforts and motivate them accordingly.

8. Have a positive and a problem-solving approach Your attitude towards problem-solving matters a lot, if you take a problem as a challenge and something to learn from you will be able to handle problems calmly and patiently. Keep a positive attitude towards problems you come across at your workplace and you will get to learn a lot from these daily issues. If you have a positive attitude towards your work and work-related issues even your team will be motivated.

9. Listen to your subordinates By listening you might get a resolution for a number of problems, you might have to solve a few problems for your team members and most of all your team members will believe that their problems are being addressed to, and their leader is considerate enough. Effective listening is extremely difficult and needs a lot of practice.

Recommendations Training on leadership to be part of the curriculum for the training of the Hydromet Cadre, such that at every level, there is an element of leadership skills/competency; Distance learning opportunities in leadership/management should be promoted to ensure uptake of this good practice in all NMHSs PRs to consider including leader/management competencies during promotion of personnel to higher positions.