Nobody Becomes A Strong Leader Who People Follow Without These 4 Core Skills
The keys that unlock your ability to have a big leadership impact.
Jose Calsina | Shutterstock Being a great leader is much harder than the good ones make it look. Nobody can teach you how to do it properly. There are few actual classes about the essence of it. Sure, you can learn about charts and personality types, and KPIs. But leading a group towards actually doing things?
It takes effort, experience, and a few stumbles along the way. Like anything in life, if you want to get better, you need to do the hard stuff. There are setbacks, doubts, false starts, and missed opportunities. Logically, you may know what you need to do. You may feel confident that when the time comes, you’ll do it.
Then whammy, a freak wave blindsides you. Now you’re not just off course, you’re potentially going under. You’ll scramble to survive, bobbing near the surface to try to get air. As the saying goes, smooth seas don’t make good sailors. Because some lessons have to be lived to be learned.
Nobody becomes a strong leader who people follow without these core skills:
1. Learning how to fire someone the right way
I know of a guy who loved firing people. He loved it so much, he stopped being a manager in his company and went freelance as a ‘corporate restructuring specialist’. Under the guise of corporate efficiency, he would get to fire people on behalf of others. As they say, do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
It’d be easy to think this guy’s a jerk. Enjoying firing? I mean, come on. That’s up there with baby punching and drop-kicking kittens. But what makes this guy different, and so special, is that if you asked him why he liked it. His answer would probably surprise you.
“I don’t fire people who don’t deserve it. 99% of the time, it’s people who don’t work hard, don’t care, or actively take advantage of the company. I’m just serving up justice.”
He’s like the Punisher, but instead of criminals, he’s avenging stolen paperclips and mysteriously frequent ‘sick days’. See, most of us don’t like firing people because we don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. Even when someone has been a nightmare to work with, the firing rarely feels good. It might feel therapeutic in the moment, but we’ll quickly feel a little regret.
And that’s because we think about either the damage we do to the other person. They might be nice, just incapable. So we feel guilty that they don’t ‘deserve’ to be fired because we’re raised to think good people shouldn’t be punished.
Or we think about it purely on a selfish level, how it makes us feel, or it challenges our idea that we can get the best out of anyone. Or that we failed. Or that we’re becoming exactly the corporate shill we worried about becoming when we took the promotion.
Feeling uneasy about firing someone? Good. That means you care about doing the right thing. Now use it. That hesitation is your natural guardrails, stopping you from getting so drunk on your power that you’re firing anyone who crosses you. It should feel a little weird and odd.
You want to be questioning the decision. But use that reluctance in deciding to ensure you’re confident you’re making the right one.
2. Giving productive, not necessarily popular, feedback
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Leadership isn’t just about making the tough calls. It’s also about guiding people to be better. And that starts with feedback. But this gentle art can be a slippery eel.
Too tough and you risk alienating the receiver. They might get defensive and reject your input, missing the value. Too soft and you risk them completely missing your point or failing to recognize it’s important and act on it.
Feedback is essential. You can’t develop a team without it. To maximize its impact, think in three layers: what you do before, what you do during, and how you follow up.
Before: Feedback shouldn’t strike fear. It should be woven into the fabric of the team. This means having a culture of open communication. And this starts with you.
Do you model a growth mindset? Are you receptive to feedback? Do you actively seek it? When planning to give more detailed feedback, make sure you choose the right time and place. Keep it comfortable, and private. And prepare your key points. Be specific, link these to examples, and provide constructive ways forward.
During: Start with positives, acknowledging people’s strengths and letting them know you’re sharing this stuff because you a) believe they’re capable of improving and b) are invested in their success and development.
Be direct, but with kindness. Use clear language. Avoid being over-critical. Focus on their actions, not who they are. Think ‘here’s how to improve X’ and not ‘you’re bad at X’.
And keep it open. Ask for their perspective and give them ownership of the improvement on their terms (rather than just giving orders).
After: Leave people feeling motivated to improve, clear how to do it, and aware you’re there to help as much as they need but won’t be overbearing or micro-managing them. Or if you need to do this because of poor performance, it should be clear to them how this will help and why it’s necessary.
Regularly check-in, but try to keep these as casual and constructive as possible. And as with the before part, keep the chain going. Regular feedback should be a natural part of the working culture.
3. Overcoming your biggest mistakes
I want to take a pause here to put myself out as a bit of a hypocrite. Because I’m about to talk about the value of something that I still struggle with. However, I say it not because I’m a ‘do what I say, not what I do’ type of guy. But because I’ve seen first-hand that when I’m able to suppress that desire to quit something that’s not going well too quickly (seeing it through to get all the lessons I can from it), I’m always, always better off.
And after years of managing and coaching, I’ve seen it’s the same for others too. Years ago, when I was at university, I worked with a guy in a nightclub. We were both bartenders, but he had big plans to be a success.
“I’m gonna be someone someday,” he’d say. Well, what do you know, one day he got the chance to put on a night at the club. So he decided to try to entice a 90s hip hop star over from America to the sunny (by UK standards) south coast of England.
He spent a lot of money (borrowed from the venue, to be repaid from proposed ticket sales) on promotion, decoration, and accommodating the act’s requests. And then we waited. Two weeks in, he’d sold 1% of tickets. One week in, 2%. The night before, 3%…
This doesn’t have a happy ending. The night flopped. Horribly. Not even everyone who bought a ticket showed up. The venue was empty. The act was so angry at no audience that he cut his 60-minute set short by 50 minutes.
Well, no worries. This guy said he’d be someone someday, right? So this is a rags-to-riches, failure-to-fortune saga? Sadly, no.
This guy saw this as a sign he’d never be a success in club promotion, and quit. What could have been his first step towards entrepreneurism died on the vine. All because he had a fixed mindset. He saw this as proof that he’s a small guy who deserves small success.
In such an embarrassing story he could have found so many lessons it could have given him the equivalent of a degree in knowledge. He could have taken the lessons and tried again. Instead, he walked away. Like missing the starting gun and quitting the whole race, he stopped before he got to the good part.
Failure isn’t a dead end, it’s the admission fee to a brighter future. The question isn’t whether you’ll make mistakes — you will — it’s about whether you’ll learn from them. Don’t quit before your knowledge assets accrue.
This guy didn’t need to be a club promoter. He could have taken the lessons elsewhere, into other careers or other lives. But the point is to make sure you learn them. Not “I’m not cut out for this”, but “I’m glad I learned this now and I’m already better off.”
4. Looking outside yourself for focus
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This year I’ll become a father for the first time. As a leader, manager, and teacher, I feel a certain amount of pressure. I pay my bills with the ability to get the best out of other people’s children. Can I bring that same energy home for my little one?
Meditating on these ideas has raised some interesting questions. What does it mean to learn? Who is responsible for getting the best out of us? Why do some people grow and flourish, and others crash and burn?
One thing I keep coming back to is how we, from a young age, recognise from the world around us the positive and negative motivators that help us either utilise, store, or forget information. As a manager, I often find (especially at the start) my attention captured and directed by forces outside my control.
In the moment, you may look like a dynamic problem-solver, putting out fires every which way. But this can quickly turn into reactive, impulsive leadership.
You don’t want other people — or the universe — telling you what to focus on. There needs to be a level of agency on your part. And while you might feel like it’s easier, and perhaps even the correct path, to focus on what seems urgent, it’s essential to make sure you make some time, no matter how small, for that which is important.
Rarely is what’s urgent important, or vice versa. You must learn to evaluate this for yourself. A key part of this is realising that even things that might not seem like your job are your responsibility. You’ll often be the one blamed when things go wrong, or expected to fix them.
But rather than a curse, see this as empowering. You get to decide the direction the team or company goes in. Since it all comes back to you, act accordingly. Calibrate your internal radar to better tell the urgent, the important, the impactful — and be ruthless and decisive in taking action.
Not because other people / the universe/convention tells you, but because you’ve decided it’s the best course of action. Then even if you’re wrong, you’ve learned. You’ll be able to do better and act quicker next time, rather than waiting to be told what to do.
It’s hard because it means making a decision, and a decision can be wrong. But better to be wrong with an open mind and learn from it how to be less wrong next time than right by luck or chance. We rarely learn in a straight line.
We must navigate an ever-winding course of ups and downs. If we can’t develop the resilience and tenacity to keep going, we may miss out on realizing our potential.
But in this lies the power of leadership. It is not bestowed on you by a title or a position. It’s earned, every day, with every action, with every response.
So don’t sell yourself short and take the easy road. See the challenges that arise for the golden nuggets of wisdom they are. Every setback is pressure that has the power to shape you into something greater.
Don’t be a diamond that chooses to stay coal. Do hard things and embrace the chance to rise to them. Future you will be grateful.
Tobias C. Shaw is a writer, leadership coach, and corporate executive. He's had articles featured in Medium and Business Insider, as well as many other sites, and has been working in and around leadership for the best part of two decades.
