Leadership Skills: A Never Ending Quest

We never really arrive at the end of the road in our quest to become leaders. We may achieve leadership status in some way but it is always a moving target.

Indeed, I believe it is our own movement on a continuous basis that can enable us to maintain ourselves as a leader. One way that we can do this is by continuously evaluating our own leadership capabilities.

I have run across an interesting way to do this regular evaluation of ourselves and would like to share it along with a couple of thoughts about it. I found this simple evaluation in a “Leadership in Project Management 2007” publication of the PMI.


Here is the evaluation:

Rate yourself by selecting one of the choices “never”, “sometimes”, or “consistently” for the following six statements:

1. I verbally communicate with team members in a manner that gets my message across while grasping the message of the other person.

2. I coach and motivate my team.

3. I am able to identify different personalities on my team and respond accordingly.

4. I am able to resolve project conflict with various stake holders.

5. When crisis such as a death or natural disaster strikes a team member, I have resources and strategies to help them return to optimal levels of performance.

6. I use stress management tools to allow me to stay calm and maintain a high level of performance.

In my own experience, using these simple evaluation points is pretty to easy to do on a regular basis. I think that “regular basis” is something that we can each define for ourselves. For me, I simply do it “periodically”. And I find that it keeps my awareness of where I stand high and does influence my behavior in positive ways.