JUN 06, 2022
If you look at the roles and responsibilities of HR professionals, leadership is an essential component of success in human resource management. As an HR manager, you are indeed a leader who has the imperative responsibility of getting the best out of your employees. How effectively you deliver as a leader in the workplace has a direct correlation with your organization’s success.
For your individual success and for your organization, it is important that you upskill your leadership skills in an incremental manner. Besides, as we already know, the modern corporate world is getting far more competitive every day. So, it makes complete sense that you work on your skill development diligently to stand out from the crowd.
It will not be incorrect to say that the more you excel as a leader the higher the success you can acclaim in your HR career. However, it is vital to know which leadership skills are the most crucial for HR professionals to master.
In this blog, we highlight the most important leadership skills that are in high demand in the contemporary corporate world. Besides, the leadership skills elucidated in this blog have a direct correlation with the success of HR professionals. So, let us get started without further ado.
5 leadership skills that can make HR managers more successful
1. Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence, better known as EQ, is in massive demand in the modern workplace. In fact, a lot of employers assert that EQ is far more important than IQ in contemporary times. This is for the simple reason that automation cannot replace emotional intelligence even if it offers a great alternative for IQ.
Did you know that people with above-average EQ earn up to USD 29000 more per annum than people with low EQ? Besides, Vantage Circle further states that EQ can improve job performance by 56 percent. Did you know that already? Every ounce of EQ you develop can literally take your career to the next level.
However, before we discuss the correlation between EQ and leadership, let us look at the definition of EQ for once to be on the same page. Emotional intelligence is an individual’s ability to manage and control emotional influences in a positive way to produce positive outcomes. Besides, people with high EQ also have the ability to positively manage and guide the emotions of others around them.
Now, this is where EQ becomes an essential leadership trait for HR managers. As an HR manager, you need to sustain high employee engagement in the workplace. For that, you need to understand your employees’ emotions and manage them in an effective way to lead your people to incredible outcomes. Especially, in the context of a diverse workplace, it is important for HR managers to have a high EQ.
In a diverse workplace with people from different backgrounds, you will have varying emotions to deal with. Unless you do not help your employees get over their emotional insecurities effectively, their productivity and engagement will remain low. With high EQ, you can manage your team’s emotions in an effective way and drive high engagement. EQ can help you become a compassionate leader who can have a positive influence on the entire team.
Furthermore, there are 5 components of high EQ that you need to know. These components are listed below.
- Empathy
- High motivation
- Social skills
- Self-awareness
- Social skills
Practically speaking, each component of EQ is a vital leadership skill in itself. The bottom line is that by mastering EQ, you can develop incredible competitive advantages. Are you going to miss this enormous opportunity?
2. Creativity
A few people might argue that creativity is not a salient career skill for HR managers, do you think the same? Well, according to the World Economic Forum, creativity is a vital part of nine of the top ten future employability skills. This explains that even HR professionals need to be creative enough to advance their careers.
The greatest of the leaders find creative ways to manage their people and lead their organizations to new horizons of growth. Being a creative and innovative person by default makes you a valuable asset for the corporate world. In managing talents, and people and getting the best out of them, you need to unleash your creativity to think of outside-the-box engagement activities.
The more creative you get with your employee engagement, team building, and confidence-building activities the higher your credibility as an HR manager. It is time you focus on nurturing your creative intellect to foster high innovation.
3.Resilience and adaptability
It is an undeniable fact that the corporate world is evolving at a rampant pace. Parallel to that, the corporate world also has more challenges to deal with than ever before. Consequently, for long-term viability, modern organizations need to incorporate massive transformations in a swift manner. This is where leaders cannot feel demotivated in the face of emerging challenges.
Modern leaders need to be resilient to challenges and should stay committed to dealing with all challenges in a confident and optimistic way. As an HR manager, even you would have to deal with frequent changes in the internal working of your organization. When organizations adapt to changes in the external business environment, there would be internal changes as well.
As an HR manager, you need to be resilient enough to incorporate those changes in the working environment. In fact, unless you are not resilient enough, how do you expect your team members to stay upbeat in the nervous times of major organizational transformations?
For your career success in 2022 and beyond, you need resilience and brisk adaptability to respond to transitions and challenges. In the modern workplace, human resource management has its own share of peculiar challenges that HR managers need to deal with as leaders. With high resilience and brisk adaptability, you can excel in your HR endeavors in an exemplary way.
4. Critical thinking
It is important for leaders to be critical thinkers and not jump to conclusions. When people think critically, they analyze every aspect and then make well-informed decisions. Also, critical thinkers take others’ perspectives into consideration as well and make decisions that are fair and for the collective good.
The question is, why is it essential for HR managers to be critical thinkers? Being an HR manager, the onus lies in you to resolve workplace conflicts that can derail the overall performance. When you mediate to resolve conflicts, you need to critically assess all arguments and claims to reach a fair conclusion.
Besides, you also need critical thinking in resolving other complex challenges in human resource management. For instance, let’s say your organization’s employee turnover rate is escalating in a brisk manner. You need to critically analyze the factors responsible for high turnover and then think of ways in which you can resolve the problem. In fact, high turnover could one of the major reasons why startups fail.
To be fair, human resource management is no cakewalk. Managing people from diverse backgrounds and with different preferences requires a lot of deliberation and planning. You need to first realize the kind of HR challenges your organization is facing and then frame streamlined approaches to solve those challenges. Hence, critical thinking is an imperative leadership trait that you need to master to lead people with different opinions, perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. With critical thinking skills, you can set SMART Objectives to optimize your organization’s talent management.
5. Leading by example
Authentic leaders have unique leadership qualities, and they lead by example. What is the fun of leaders preaching something that they don’t practice themselves? In times when the modern workplace is evolving rampantly, you need to set fine examples for your teams.
You need to model the right conduct, optimism, and innovation for your employees. Also, work ethics like accountability, reliance, commitment, discipline, and integrity are imperative for organizational success. Again, as a leader, you need to lead by example and set high standards of commitment and work ethics in the workplace.
In the ultimate sense, your productivity as an HR manager will be assessed in terms of the working environment you are able to create in the organization. If you are successful in creating a high-performance culture with high retention rates, your credibility becomes undoubted.
To sum up, let us acknowledge the fact in any organization, HR managers are change leaders. Your performance as an HR will be evaluated time and again based on your leadership effectiveness. Having said that, you need to set smart goals for yourself to develop unparalleled leadership qualities that enable you to excel in your career.
Jessica Robinson loves to write interesting and knowledgeable blogs regarding business management, education and life to satiate the curiosity of her lovely readers. Currently, she is serving as a content manager at the ‘Speaking Polymath’. Every piece of content that she writes demonstrates her immense love and passion for her profession.
