Being in a leadership position in today’s corporate environment means successfully combining management skills set with leadership and coaching skills sets.

This is also called the propeller method and it was developed by Christina Lagnelius.

• Having leadership skills mostly means having vision, being inspiring and motivating people, being able to make people follow you. 
• Having management skills means being able to create and implement a strategy, be firm, organized and oriented towards results.
• Having coaching skills means being able to help your team members develop and solve problems by themselves, empower them to grow and trust in their potential, feeling trusted, respected and cared for. 

What if you would have vision but no strategy? What would happen with your ideas unless you can develop the strategy to put them into practice?  You will need discipline, resilience, focus and orientation towards results in order to be able to implement your strategy.

Now what if you would have all these, discipline, resilience, orientation toward results, planning and organizing skills but no vision and no ability to inspire and motivate people? What would your strategy deliver if it does not inspire and it doesn’t have a vision?

What if you have vision and strategy but you lack coaching skills?

People spend approximately half of their life at work. They need to feel appreciated, trusted, they need to feel they grow and that they are part of something bigger. They need to be involved in your strategy and believe in your vision. That’s why you need to inspire them and motivate them.

Through coaching people are guided to find their own solutions to problems, they are guided towards being creative and empowered, they feel trusted, listened, encouraged and appreciated.

Through guiding them to find solutions you are helping them grow and be independent. As they won’t depend on you so much you will be left with time to invest it in your own growth, vision and strategy.

If you give people immediate solutions every time they ask for your advice they will depend on you each time they won’t know what to do, they will expect you to solve the problems no matter how small and this will be inefficient for you as a manager.

Imagine each skills set is a blade of plane propeller, imagine driving/ being in a plane that only has 2 of the blades or an incomplete one. How well do you think it will fly, how much effort shall be put in it and how much fuel will it consume?

Now imagine combining these 3 categories of skills, having vision, delivering and implementing the strategy, delivering results, motivating and inspire people to follow your vision and strategy and come up with solutions while growing and developing and feeling they belong and they contribute. 

That’s what it means to be a successful leader and the good news is that you can work on yourself to become this great person people will look up to.