About the Author: Rafael Magaña, is the Founder, President & CEO of Latino Professionals, Latina Professionals and Latinx Professionals. He helps organizations, departments, and teams grow and teams. Helps leaders accelerate strategy implementation in their organizations. Specializes in leadership, management, and philanthropy. He has published more than 250 scholarly articles. Visit and connect with him on LinkedIn and on Twitter: @RafaelMagana
We all know how beneficial leadership skills can be in attaining favorable career positions. The problem is, not everyone is a born leader. So, what can you do if you want the benefits that come with having leadership skills, but simply don’t possess them? The answer is quite simple: you learn them. Believe it or not, there are many excellent ways to learn and hone your leadership and management abilities. In this article, we’ll take a look at three of the best and easiest methods for learning this set of skills.
The first approach is to begin reading books on leadership and management. As strange as it may sound, there are huge numbers of books available on this subject. To start off with, you should read books that give you an overview of the basic skills and techniques that are involved in management and leadership. Once you have developed a good grasp of these basic principles, you can graduate to books dealing with more specific matters, such as different leadership styles, upper-level management, and how to apply your leadership skills in the real world. In this way, you can give yourself a fairly good crash course. This method is especially economical if you happen to have a digital device on which you can download and read ebooks, as there are many excellent books on this subject available in digital format.
Alternatively, you can look into the possibility of attending a leadership seminar. This is a much more hands on approach, but it can be very effective, particularly for the person with no basis or background in management. Such seminars usually last several hours, and present participants with many different tools and skills that they can apply in their own careers to develop their leadership abilities. These events are often the best method for developing your skills, as they are usually hosted and presented by real experts in leadership and management who can give you a very concentrated view of the things that have worked for them in their own careers. In other words, these seminars can cut straight to the best and most effective management tools out there. To find a seminar to attend, you can perform an online search for leadership conferences or seminars in your area. In there are none coming up, don’t fret. You can also attend an online webinar for the same information. This will be the most expensive method of the three we discuss here, but can also be the most effective.
Finally, you can find yourself a personal leadership mentor. This doesn’t need to be a professional coach or management teacher, but simply someone you know with experience in the field. If you currently work for a company that you would like to advance in, you might even ask your own manager or supervisor to help you learn the skills you will need to move forward. This gives you a one on one resource for learning leadership skills. Anyone with good experience and management skills will suffice as a mentor, including friends or family members. Your mentor should be someone who is willing to answer questions, practice different management scenarios with you, and guide you through the process of developing your own skills.
These three methods may be the best, but there are far from being the only ones. You can take college courses on business management, sign up for online based courses, or even just jump in by finding a lower level management position and learning as you go. The point is, you don’t need to be a born leader in order to have leadership skills. Like anything else, they can be taught. So, if you want to better your career by advancing into a management position, look into these different ways of learning the skills you will need to be successful in that position. You will very likely be surprised at how fast you can learn them.