People Skills Essential to Leadership In their book Leadership Through People Skills (McGraw-Hill), Robert E. Lefton and Victor R. Buzzotta discuss ways to become a more productive leader through the use of people skills. They asset, "A productive leader sees to it that people do their jobs with the skills and commitment needed to produce the best obtainable results at the lowest feasible outlay of money, time, and resources."

Acording to Lefton and Buzzotta, "People skills is an umbrella term for four related sets of abilities:

"1. Sizing-up skills. Productive leadership requires the ability to a) observe what people do in work situations as objectively as you can, and b) figure out why they do it, so that you can make sense out of what you see. This, in turn, helps you interact effectively with other people by selecting the appropriate action from a whole range of actions you might take.

"2. Communication skills. Sizing up is only the beginning. Once you've diagnosed your own and other people's behavior, you must devise a communication strategy for finding out what others think and for getting your own ideas across. This ability to exchange ideas is essential to productive problem-solving and decision-making, and both are necessary for productive leadership.

"3. Motivational skills. It takes more than communication to get people to work productively. It takes motivation - the creation of an environment in which people do what they're capable of because they have a compelling reason to do so. Before they'll put themselves into their work, people want the answer to the question, "What's in it for me?" It will take your motivational skills to provide the incentive that makes it worthwhile for them to tap into their reserves of ability and energy.

"4. Adaptive skills. Productive leaders relate to people as unique individuals. They don't deal with everyone in the same way. They vary their communication and motivation techniques to meet the variety of people's needs. Therefore, the most effective leaders are creative. They shape their actions to fit the individuals for whom they're intended.

Lefton and Buzzotta argue that these people skills – combined with the necessary technical skills (engineering, marketing, manufacturing, etc.) and administrative skills (planning, organizing, controlling, etc.) -- are essential to productive leadership.

"Understand that most leaders have already learned some fundamental people skills," they write. "We call this using our common sense. If leaders weren't using common sense skills, they wouldn't be able to carry out their assignments. We are not concerned with creating all new skills from scratch, but with building on these existing ones. However, developing better people skills takes both understanding and the willingness to practice them."

___________________

Leadership Through People Skills by Robert E. Lefton and Victor R. Buzzotta (McGraw-Hill, 2004).

Click here to learn more about this and other resourses.

___________________

Robert E. Lefton is cofounder, president and co-CEO of Psychological Associates.

Victor R. Buzzotta is cofounder, co-CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Psychological Associates, and CEO of Dimensional Worldwide.