For Astute Leaders: 4 Skills to Level Up Your Leadership

Written by Sarah Coley, Ph.D.

The nature of work has profoundly changed within the past three years.¹ The way workers think today was sparked by necessity—by the COVID-19 protocols intended to keep themselves and customers safe—but workers have moved from considerations of what work “has to be” so they can stay employed, to what work “should be”: What does a job look like when it is designed to create value for themselves and others while avoiding undue stress?

Every level of leadership is responsible for adapting to these new ways of thinking—the new worker psychology. Workers are looking for support in multiple areas, from top executives espousing organizational purpose,² to HR departments securing desirable benefits, to immediate managers both giving and receiving information to ensure workers’ expectations are met.

All this novelty in the workforce might feel overwhelming. Fortunately, decades of research have cut through the noise to uncover the skillsets that successful leaders need so their organizations can get back to the metrics that matter most, like more satisfied workers, lower turnover rates, and creating a better culture.

While these skills are not new, they are evergreen in their ability to help leaders and workers navigate times of change.

Working on the right skills is critical because leaders have an outsized, direct influence on the outcomes of their team—including their workers’ motivation to go above and beyond in their role.³

The four skills we recommend, as supported by research, are as follows: building empathy, fostering connection, nurturing trust, and creating resilience. Each skill can be developed individually, but leaders can also capitalize on the synergy between them.

It starts with empathy: Leaders who challenge themselves to be more empathetic, while working to ensure their positive intentions are accurately received, will enable new methods of connection among their team. Because maintaining connection requires effort, it is our second recommended skill. Research shows that connection sparked by empathy creates trust—the third area leaders need to focus on—and trust helps teams to be more adaptable and intentional with their efforts.⁴ This, in turn supports resilience, which is deemed the fourth essential skill because the best leaders will continually strive to maintain resilience even as new stressors impact them and their team.

Starting with empathy is important because leaders’ attempts to connect might have zero effect, or even backfire, if they appear out-of-touch by using their relationship-focused skills at the wrong time or in ill-informed ways.⁵ Being equitably empathetic toward one’s team—and making sure their needs are accurately understood—can pay off with authentic connection⁶ and workers trusting their leaders to guide them through tasks.⁷

To unlock these advantages, leaders can tune in to their emotions and observe how those enable their own motivations and reactions. From that, they can extrapolate how others experience emotions similarly—but also differently.^8,9 Realizing that each new situation can affect workers differently helps leaders anticipate the individual attention needed by members of their team.

Once leaders demonstrate their empathy, deeper connections become possible. According to neuropsychology, leaders and their teams have a natural proclivity to connect if the conditions are right—when leaders show up in genuine ways to foster that connection.¹⁰

The benefits of positive connection go beyond a leader’s individual connections with workers, because how a leader behaves can encourage workers to engage with the rest of the organization.¹¹ This might owe to leadership influencing not just individual workers, but the entire culture.¹² This network of influence only grows when leaders consider that even higher levels of leadership can inspire workers to feel connected. Upper management can signal their support to the entire organization with effective communication and resource empowerment, which can pay off with outcomes such as decreased turnover.¹³ The impact that high-quality leader connections have on lower turnover and a worker’s intent to stay might signal that workers are being made more resilient against stressors that might otherwise make them resign.¹⁴ This is more evidence that these critical leadership skills work together synergistically.

Like in most contexts, trust within an organization must be earned, and leaders at every level have a responsibility to make good on their promises. Concepts that are good in theory, like two-way communication, might have paradoxical effects if workers actively communicate to leaders, but with no payoff.¹⁴ When an effective system of trust has been established, it will improve how workers think of their work¹⁵ and empower them to share feedback due to feelings of psychological safety.¹⁶ This can put leaders on the fast track to receiving vital information for helping workers, perhaps even across multiple units, before issues fester and truly become a problem.

There are several avenues to building trust, including supporting workers’ individual needs,¹⁷ meeting workers’ expectations, and ensuring fairness.¹⁵ This highlights that leaders cannot simply give what they think is needed. Instead, they must listen to workers’ needs first—through individual conversations and data-informed decisions—to ensure that support is both relevant and delivered without delay.

Congratulations—once your team is experiencing the benefits of resilience, a great deal has already been accomplished! Your main goal now is to maintain and grow your other foundational skills while unlocking the full benefits of resilience.

The biggest challenges to resilient teams are the shifting circumstances that can undermine the progress you made together. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented amounts of change in a short time and indiscriminately invoked new sets of stressors and needs in everyone across the world.¹⁸ Leaders are essential for steering teams through such events, and they must also remain alert to more conventional stressors their workers experience. Some situations will require an organization-wide rollout to triangulate the support offered to workers, and ensuring that workers can use that support might require some coordination among top leaders and immediate managers.¹⁹

Even before considering our new reality at work, and the new worker psychology that comes with it, growing the right set of skills is a lifelong journey. It demands that leaders constantly adapt to face new situations—the necessity of which can be seen throughout history. The COVID-19 pandemic was not the first catalyst of major change at work, and it won’t be the last.

Leaders with an intention to learn can become masters of that change, allowing them to experience changes and their resulting emotional effects with efficacy and confidence. Regardless of how long leaders continue to develop themselves, with the right guidance and research, every milestone will feel more impactful and meaningful—and will make our current reality of work feel that much more manageable.