22 Self-Improvement Areas for Leadership Development

An HRPA study from 2016 reports that 63% of millennials complain that employers aren’t fully developing their leadership skills, with 72% of those surveyed last year insisting on feedback, coaching and leadership development to remain in an organization.

I have previously covered the 11 key traits that define great managers, compiled after 17 years in management. These management-specific values fit the job description, but lack the depth and value in areas of leadership that every individual can partake in and develop from a young age.

In this piece, I will uncover some of the most important traits that we look for when hiring intrapreneurs and top talent internally, as well as the main areas to work on with individuals and managers for professional self-improvement across different organizations.

And if you want to double down on scientifically backed content, grab HBR’s Leadership Collection on Amazon and read on while it’s on the way.

Self-Improvement

1. Defining Success

World leaders are successful by definition – which sets the first area of leadership development in this guide.

To define success, you first need to find out what success means for you. St. Thomas Aquinas brought up the Four Idols in the 13th century and his thesis is adapted to the modern business world.

The four idols define the most common goals worshipped by extreme leaders:

  • Money
  • Power
  • Pleasure
  • Fame

Success strikes differently for different people – and identifying what idol sits on top for you (or an alternative one, if any) is a great starting point.

But more importantly, if you do not know what you are striving for, odds are you are going to be unhappy and dissatisfied with your accomplishments. Dig deeper into your value framework and find out what makes you happy, settle down with specific accomplishments, work towards your goals, and celebrate milestones.

One of the most impactful leadership books I’ve read on the matter is The Success Principles. Jack Canfield is the co-author behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and has spent a couple of decades refining his framework.

Once you pass the first level, it’s time to zoom out for the next step.

Mario Peshev

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2. Foreseeing The Bigger Picture

We miss out on different promotion opportunities, partnerships, or hiring top talent unless we look at the bigger picture.

Sometimes, we are fairly narrow-minded when it comes to assessing different situations with people.

During my leadership development exercises, we go through my brief bigger picture framework including the core areas:

  1. Vision
  2. Strategy
  3. Planning
  4. Direction
  5. Decision-Making
  6. Resource Allocation
  7. Adaptability
  8. Innovation
  9. Sustainability
  10. Alignment

But in reality, if we look deeper, we can uncover many more opportunities to achieve better ROI or tackle new directions.

One of the most hindering emotions for many people is fear. I’d recommend Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway as it challenges readers to convert fear into a motivational tool for action and love, providing dynamic techniques for personal empowerment.

Draw the bigger picture before making a call to avoid rash, uninformed decisions after.

3. Developing Discipline

Being disciplined and knowing what you are fighting for and what you are aiming for is just as integral as defining success.

Moreover, it is a complementary skill by itself.

As you gain power and influence, discipline is an integral skill to not let yourself trip. In Unlimited Power, Tony Robbins unveils such strategies to unlock one’s true potential, offering a roadmap to personal excellence and empowerment.

Furthermore, I have developed a detailed guide that uncovers how to build discipline for yourself and how to adapt it for your teamwork.

Developing Discipline

4. Embracing Intrinsic Motivation

There are two types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic

The extrinsic type of motivation is related to external factors around different activities you deal with.

Intrinsic motivation is a lot more important because it digs deeper into your value system and leads to satisfaction on a much deeper level.

I recently had a look through Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. I can say that it has restructured parts of my views on intrinsic motivation in particular, especially when it comes to harnessing personal power.

For instance, if the paycheck is the only thing that keeps you at work, it is 100% extrinsic motivation. But if you find a job or build a business that brings you joy as a result of what you do on a day to day, then your increasing motivation is going to be a lot stronger.

For an in-depth discussion on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, check out my complete motivation guide.

5. Entering Focus Mode

Getting back on track after getting distracted can waste so much of your time. 

It requires an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to focus back on a previous task, according to a study by the University of California. Aside from that, distractions cause more than 40 percent of people to experience pressure and anxiety especially when they are unable to finish their work.

Disrupting focus is covered in depth by experts profiling in the interruption science. The Productivity Prohibitors study by SurePayroll claims that low productivity costs employers $1.8 trillion every single year.

It is integral to be capable of entering focus mode while many business leaders are swamped 24/7.

Even the best ones and the biggest billionaires are booking time for themselves. 

When it comes to my approach to focus, I try to build habits that transcend the usual focus advice, as I find them unhelpful. I’ve come to realize that little things make a huge difference in the long term. Some reading material I’d recommend for this is Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Scheduling time for focused work or strategy, planning, reading, learning, or even multitasking will really accomplish a lot more for you on a personal level, and your satisfaction increases.

6. Increasing Productivity

We all have 24 hours a day at our disposal.

The question is: how do you utilize them most efficiently?

The difference between great leaders and regular people is mostly related to scheduling, planning, and organizing workload. 

Efficient organizations are organizations that achieve high productivity results and better output in less time with less effort, which is what all leaders should strive for. 

To increase productivity, check out the following productivity frameworks and techniques                 :

Productivity Frameworks

7. Clearing Communication

If I have to rank these skills up, communication would be my number one trait.

I would look for clear and crisp workplace communication manifested through the following:

  • escalating on time
  • reporting challenges
  • foreseeing obstacles
  • asking promptly for clarifications

Communication taps into every area of business or career growth.

No matter what you do, failing to produce and abide by a clear communication protocol will always be an obstacle to your professional development.

If you haven’t heard of this classic book, I’d strongly recommend How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It’s been instrumental in enhancing many people’s communication skills, teaching timeless principles of human interaction.

8. Developing Soft Skills

There are plenty of soft skills you need to leverage while developing the full suite of leadership traits.

Some of them are also covered in this list, including communication or negotiation skills, and any bonding tactics to operate effectively within a team environment.

Regardless of your career ambitions, you will always be working with people in your team: bosses, colleagues, subordinates, majors, vendors, partners, investors, board members, followers, the media.

Professional soft skills usually result in accomplishments, long-term contracts and partnerships, better profitability, and a lot more. It is an important investment in the grand scheme of things.

Here is the complete list I covered in the previous post linked earlier:

Soft Skills

9. Adopting Creative Thinking

Being a copycat won’t get you anywhere. Adopt creative thinking with the help of certain strategies for improving your creative thinking skills.

Of course, following the best practices and methodologies that are already established is a great way to start.

But while good artists copy, great artists steal.

And if I have to assume that, the extraordinary artists just have their own creative flair that distinguishes them from the rest.

One of the exceptional examples of extreme creative thinking I’ve recently come across is in Think Like a Freak where an Australian doctor swallows a bag of bacteria to get an ulcer and proceeds to solve an incredible medical mystery!

10. Thinking Critically

How many times have you stumbled upon a “fact” on Facebook or Instagram that was wrong?

Have you studied any facts in your history lessons that turned out to be false?

Well, I have. Trusting blindly everything you see on the internet or everything you hear during the meeting, would not let you spark your creative juices and potentially push an idea to the next level.

Lack of critical thinking leads to controlled masses and entire governments taking advantage of the global population. Education is the go-to pill to prevent the production from brainwashed leaders, but blindly studying facts isn’t enough.

Check out the following skills necessary for critical thinking:

Critical Thinking Skills

11. Developing A Growth Mindset

The growth mindset is the difference between an intrapreneur and a regular employee.

A regular employee often finds it hard to accomplish a given set of tasks. An intrapreneur or someone who can be promoted within an organization to a higher tier is someone who can take an idea, build upon it, come up with new revenue strategies, think of ways to optimize it or automate it, and eventually find ways to hire a team for it, and so on.

As you can see, it all revolves around growth, but the growth mindset isn’t just something that you go to work with. It is a mentality that enables you to think in your day-to-day life, and how to hack into life and just discover opportunities for progress and expansion in a productive way.

12. Adopting Empathy

As a subset of soft skills, empathy is crucial if you aim to scale. 

You have to be ready to conquer the world. This means that you have to be ready to work with thousands of people from different cultures and religions in different points of life, and fully focus on how you can help them or how we can work together. 

Without empathy, you will only focus on your logical thinking—and in the middle, many subtle details. They are otherwise going to help you build a better bond, or uncover better opportunities to just peer up together.

Here, Carnegie’s principles in How to Win Friends & Influence People shine again in fostering empathy and genuinely understanding and connecting with others.

After all, empathy is what differentiates a human being from a robot.

13. Understanding Accountability

If you want to progress in the organization, or if you want to grow your current contract with a client you are working for, you would need to be accountable for everything you do.

Accountability is all about covering for what you are in charge of and ensuring it is done on time, and in the best possible manner.

In the real world, there’s a lot of finger-pointing, excuses, and justifications when something goes south, which means that other people need to take responsibility in the end.

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s ‘Extreme Ownership‘ showcases in a truly insightful way the essence of understanding accountability in leadership, emphasizing the importance of taking full responsibility.

Understanding how accountability works, and taking care of that level of responsibility is a major step to bring you to the next level.

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14. Taking Ownership

Career-wise, or consulting-wise, you would be in charge of certain responsibilities or contracts.

The more activities you own, especially after you master accountability, the more power you will have in the long run.

The responsibilities are something you have to live with and accept as part of your life.

However, this reduces the overhead of hiring managers or Quality Assurance people, and other agencies taking care of what you do.

So owning what you do, and making sure that the consequences will be relayed to you. It relieves the other parties from obligations, which is a cheaper version for them, and also builds a stronger bond with you as someone who owns their work.

15. Handling Feedback

Feedback works in both ways. You need to learn how to give great feedback and receive critical feedback.

Receiving feedback is one of the main traits I test for during interviews – and a critical leadership skill. One of the easiest tests to fail as a newcomer in management.

If your ego isn’t intact, you won’t be open to feedback or different ways to accomplish a certain thing. Closing up will cause tension, suppress innovation, and prevent collaboration.

It may also result in anger management issues and other trades impairing your work within an organization.

I wrote two separate guides for successful leaders around feedback handling:

  • Employee feedback guide on handling performance reviews, gathering feedback, and effective 360 sessions
  • Client feedback guide on actively seeking feedback from customers, browsing support tickets, and triaging on common issues

To truly progress, one must be able to achieve ego disillusion at the right moments and accept the objective reality of things. David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me has been pivotal in showing me how to handle feedback resiliently

So the lack of feedback management may be crucial for any promotion, or business opportunity.

16. Dealing With Stress 

Taking on more responsibilities, working with more people, and taking ownership will inevitably put a lot more burden on your plate.

If you aren’t used to that, you will burn out quickly, especially if productivity isn’t one of your strong suits.

Dan Sullivan’s 10x Is Easier than 2x offers some actionable insights into managing stress by focusing on efficiency and impact rather than sheer effort. That’s something I always try to follow and write about as well.

To combat these, you must come prepared with the best stress management practices.

Stress Management

17. Prioritizing Sleep 

While grinding in your 20s or even 30s may still be achievable, at some point, it no longer is. 

Young entrepreneurs hustling 24/7 are no exception. Starting a business in your first year or two may be all about grinding – and proving yourself during the first job or two are a necessity to grow into a leadership role later.

This is the feast and famine cycle. In the long run, when it comes to survival and continuous growth, you need to think of it as a marathon, managing to get enough sleep to thrive.

I took my sleep habits seriously in my early 30s after 15+ years of work (my first engineering and training jobs were at 15 years old.) The added fatigue kept impacting my productivity and affecting my health. I took my Garmin stats more seriously and bought an Oura ring after and a Whoop to keep track on recovery rates and sleep efficiency.

James Clear outlines methods for prioritizing sleep through habit formation in Atomic Habits, thus striving to achieve peak performance.

Most of my executive peers, coaches, trainers have been prioritizing sleep over the past years. An extra hour at night is priceless.

18. Working Out

Keeping your body in shape is important for various reasons.

On the one hand, you are going to prevent different injuries and different forms of sickness, and you’d be in a better shape to handle different circumstances.

On the other hand, working out is training your body to handle more daily. This increases your endurance and stamina and allows you to take on more work or bigger challenges as a leader. The higher you step up professionally, the heavier the burden you need to undertake.

Heart disease is one of the top 3 reasons for death in the US. It’s tied to a number of reasons for clogging arteries, including inactivity, obesity, high blood pressure. Doctors recommend both aerobic exercises (running or biking) and resistance training (like weightlifting) for the best countermeasure.

I picked CrossFit as my main sport combining both, with cycling, swimming, surfing and running when oossible.

In a nutshell, a body workout improves your brain function and your overall productivity. If you want to remain a successful leader, survival is the very first step to get there.

19. Eating Healthy

As part of the self-improvement series, taking on all activities that great leaders pay attention to is important. 

Healthy eating is the next addition to working out. Healthy eating is an expedition to getting enough sleep, working out, and drinking enough water.

You definitely do not want to end up with diabetes or obesity which will prevent you from taking on important business opportunities or advancing your career. Healthy eating is tied to better health, lower chance of getting fat, lower fatigue, more energy throughout the day, better appearance – and a better example to everyone on your team.

20. Setting Goals

Goal setting is a really underappreciated cue out there.

The difference between a dream and an accomplishment is usually the goal-setting process.

Leaders focus on self-improvement, invest a lot in building smart goals, broken down into milestones that they can follow and celebrate as part of their success strategy.

This prevents them from adding too many distractions to the list, and only focuses them on the most important accomplishments they want to pursue.

21. Handling Finances

Finance management is crucial regardless of whether you are running operations, managing a team in an organization, or just starting out. 

This involves anything from personal finances to investing in stocks or crypto to being able to allocate resources to pay off debt or save some funds for real estate, and so on.

Smart financial management means you need to drop a lot of your materialistic goals such as spending cash on parties and clubs and have a smart investment plan instead, both short-term and long-term, to get to the next level.

Tony Robbins’ Unshakeable is an invaluable playbook on financial management and freedom, offering actionable advice on handling finances that leads to confidence and financial freedom.

There are lots of ways to go about that. But prioritizing personal finance is an important achievement so that you have diversified income levels or ways to accomplish your personal goals without being fully dependent on monthly payroll.

22. Learning Continuously

The best managers and leaders always allocate time to learning.

CEOs spend tons of time with the rest of the executives or fellow leaders who help enable them to learn a ton about different industries.

The difference between them and regular employees is merely the access to tons of smart talent in a short period of time.

But in order to get there, you need to understand that learning is a continuous process, and you have to allocate time for learning.

Different studies suggest that booking one hour a day for reading, or taking a course, or working on a pet project is a great way to start and improve upon your skills.

Alternatives to traditional business education are all around, for instance, Josh Kaufman’s The Personal MBA presents a condensed alternative to mainstream education through the essentials of entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, negotiation, and more.

Leadership Development Is a Process

Becoming a leader is an incremental journey of personal growth.

And the hidden traits that top leaders possess are the main reason we want to follow through and accomplish what they have done as well.

The way most leaders start and run their venture is fully contingent on their ability to focus and prioritize to handle stress and to employ empathy, take ownership, improve their soft skills, communicate clearly with the media and other people, and live a healthy life.

The full package of traits and habits is what makes a great leader someone worth following.

Start today and pick 2 of these areas to work on over the next month. Then pick two more and then some more. Turn this into a continuous process. And remember, look at these as your intrinsic motivation.

No matter what happens, you will improve yourself personally and professionally by working on those areas.

Eager to take the next level of your leadership journey? Join my Community today.

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