How to Prove You Have Leadership Qualities

culled from:wikihow.com


Leadership is an intangible asset that usually cannot be showcased through medals or plaques, as athleticism or aesthetic talent can. However, it is essential for the operations of any organization and corporation as well as for the successful completion of any project. If you know you've risen to the occasion to lead a group to success, but are not sure about how to best present those achievements to demonstrate that you are qualified for other leadership positions, continue reading this article.

Steps

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Identify your leadership style. You need to know what kind of a leader you are before you can prove to others that you can head a team or project. This requires that you understand your dominant personality traits, relative strengths and weaknesses, and core values.

• Think about what the other complimentary personalities you work well with. This, in turn, should reflect your individual role in projects. Knowing your weaknesses also helps you realize what other personalities you should keep around to fill in those holes in a group.
• Think about what your go-to strategies for motivating others are. How hands-on or hands-off are you in managing progress? How would you resolve disputes and conflicts?
• If you already know you are a leader, chances are that's because you've had informal experiences where you've demonstrated such initiative (e.g., classroom projects, club meetings, volunteering work, etc.) Reflect on what you've done in the past by analyzing the role you played, how you were motivated to adopt that role, and what impact you had on the project overall. Doing some self-reflection and creating a list of examples that you can draw from will go a long way towards showing, not telling, other people that you can lead.

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   Review your resume and mark the experiences in which you have demonstrated leadership. Practice explaining each accomplishment in a few sentences, so that you can concisely demonstrate your impact on groups to an audience. This will also be a good chance for you to think about potential references whom you can contact and ask to speak on your behalf. If other professionals are recommending you for a particular leadership position, you will seem much more qualified for the job.
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   Think about how your skills and past experiences will allow you to uniquely contribute to an upcoming project, specifically with respect to leading and organizing the project. Start by identifying possible needs and goals of the project. Then connect your ideas and traits to those objectives. Be as specific as possible in how you will benefit the organization, so that your audience can envision you in a leadership role.
   • Example: As the editor-in-chief of an online school newspaper, one of my roles was serving as a liaison between our website and the four other school publications that hosted the online version of their publication on our websites. This required that I oversee the development of a content management system that could be exported to various publications and easily trained to staffs totaling over a hundred journalists. Thus, I met with the editors of each publication continually to understand what functions they needed on their websites as well as with our webmasters to make a plan for implementing those features. My exposure to such a high level of communication and coordination ensures that I will be well-prepared to serve as this corporation's communication coordinator. Not only will I keep everyone organized and on-track for completing their tasks, but I will be able to envision the big-picture progress of our project until its completion.
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   Approach the supervisor or hiring manager and set up a meeting with them to talk about a potential future role that you'd like to play in the company. Presumably, you would like to prove to them that you have leadership qualities in order to assume a greater executive role. Be respectful and humble, but also confident and firm. You want to do an honest and accurate job selling yourself to the company and pitching your skills, but you also do not want to come off as arrogant or overly presumptuous.
   • It's important to keep track of your contributions to a company. At the right moment, you'll want to ask for promotions when you deserve them based on your tangible results. Your boss has a lot to worry about on his or her plate and potentially many other staff members to keep track of, so your accomplishments may be overlooked. You should not hesitate to be your own advocate when the time is right, but you do want to be careful about asking for too much too often. Avoid rubbing your boss the wrong way.
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   If you achieve the desired leadership position, make sure you follow through with what you promised! For a supervisor, there's nothing worse than buying into how an employee sells him or herself and then failing to meet expectations and producing the promised objectives. Receiving a leadership position means that you now have a new opportunity to prove yourself to everyone else, and you should take full advantage of that by putting 100% effort in. Failing to do so means that you lose the trust of your colleagues and supervisors and may jeopardize future opportunities.