The Leadership Skills You Think You’ve Outgrown May Be the Ones You Need Most

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Complexity is often where we go to feel safe. If it will take months of models and matrices to find a solution, the outcome is delayed, and then not your fault if it fails. Go back to the problem you’re grappling with — the one you built the framework for, the one you scheduled three meetings about before you scheduled the work. Ask yourself what you would have done if you’d trusted yourself with it on day one. So often in leadership circles we look for the complicated answer — the one that requires input from all team members and takes scrutiny from every angle. And, to be honest, sometimes that is exactly what’s needed. But I’ve found that more often than not, what’s really required to make sense of a situation or find direction is a return to basics. The fundamental unit of work is a conversation. Part of working well together means learning and practicing these fundamental skills such as active listening, presence, asking open, honest questions and deciding who makes decisions and how they are made in any conversation. In your business, these are the skills that give you an edge and foster healthy collaboration, clear speaking, making sure that the vision is well understood and that good commitment hygiene is tended to.Many leaders learn to be patient, make decisions, move forward by weighing pros and cons and — if you’re lucky — trust their intuition. The best leaders can identify overthinking, confer-and-defer tendencies and conflict avoidance in themselves as well as in their teammates. Healthy teams can surface these in the group when they arise by recognizing and naming them so they don’t bog down their considerations. But when the essentials of good leadership are lost, I see leaders get caught up trying to solve difficult problems by reaching for the most complex solutions. Teams, then, get trapped in a mire. Why we drift Sophisticated solutions tend to masquerade as expertise, and reaching for a basic skill can feel almost shameful when you’re trying to wear the mask of an infallible leader. It’s hard to set ego aside and use the tools you started with. It’s a lesson in humility that’s not easy to learn. ‘I’ve learned so many new things since I first began, so why would I do something so simple?’ This is a question a client brought to me when I suggested drawing on listening skills to work through a team dispute. Sure, you have new skills and knowledge, and you’re most certainly not the person you were when you started your career, but that doesn’t mean those core skills of good leadership you learned a long time ago are baseless. Returning to what you know at your core is often the advice I give to my clients. It’s also frequently the advice they need to hear. Follow the bread crumbs There are some ways to tell if your efforts to solve a problem are caught in an endless loop. If you find yourself stuck in over-consulting, endless information gathering, solutions nobody can explain, decisions that keep getting deferred and problems that never seem to be solved, it’s time to follow the breadcrumbs back to basics. Some ways to get back to what works when no other solution seems to be helping can include: Remember the way to say what’s not being said. Return to leaving space for the silence you may always want to fill. Stand back or step forward only when needed. Offer suggestions, not solutions, and let your team work it out when they need to. Leave room for disagreement and alternate opinions. Lean in and listen attentively. Ask good questions of the content and ways of thinking. Be crystal clear about the vision and make sure it’s well understood by everyone on the team. Provide all the necessary information and business context that you have (and can share) so that the team sees what you see. Don’t assume everyone has that context. The reframe ​It’s important to let go of the mindset that returning to basic skills means regression. Those fundamental skills aren’t something you learn once and put aside. Fundamentals aren’t the beginner stage you graduated from; they’re the thing you consistently get better at. Basics steeped in experience look like listening before diagnosing, presence over performance, intuition as experience rather than guesswork and knowing when and how to be present. ​Go back to the problem you’re grappling with — the one you built the framework for, the one you scheduled three meetings about before you scheduled the work. Ask yourself what you would have done if you’d trusted yourself with it on day one. Complexity is often where we go to feel safe. If it will take months of models and matrices to find a solution, the outcome is delayed (and then not your fault if it fails). Sitting with a problem and trusting your own judgment leaves you holding it alone, and that can be frightening. But it’s also how you grow. It’s how those basic skills evolve, and it’s how you’ll move past this problem and to the next one with confidence. Going back to basics asks more of us than frameworks do. It asks us to stop, think, listen and remember how and why it all started. Key Takeaways Complexity is often where we go to feel safe. If it will take months of models and matrices to find a solution, the outcome is delayed, and then not your fault if it fails. Go back to the problem you’re grappling with — the one you built the framework for, the one you scheduled three meetings about before you scheduled the work. Ask yourself what you would have done if you’d trusted yourself with it on day one. So often in leadership circles we look for the complicated answer — the one that requires input from all team members and takes scrutiny from every angle. And, to be honest, sometimes that is exactly what’s needed. But I’ve found that more often than not, what’s really required to make sense of a situation or find direction is a return to basics. The fundamental unit of work is a conversation. Part of working well together means learning and practicing these fundamental skills such as active listening, presence, asking open, honest questions and deciding who makes decisions and how they are made in any conversation. In your business, these are the skills that give you an edge and foster healthy collaboration, clear speaking, making sure that the vision is well understood and that good commitment hygiene is tended to.Many leaders learn to be patient, make decisions, move forward by weighing pros and cons and — if you’re lucky — trust their intuition. The best leaders can identify overthinking, confer-and-defer tendencies and conflict avoidance in themselves as well as in their teammates. Healthy teams can surface these in the group when they arise by recognizing and naming them so they don’t bog down their considerations. But when the essentials of good leadership are lost, I see leaders get caught up trying to solve difficult problems by reaching for the most complex solutions. Teams, then, get trapped in a mire. Why we drift Sophisticated solutions tend to masquerade as expertise, and reaching for a basic skill can feel almost shameful when you’re trying to wear the mask of an infallible leader. It’s hard to set ego aside and use the tools you started with. It’s a lesson in humility that’s not easy to learn. ‘I’ve learned so many new things since I first began, so why would I do something so simple?’ This is a question a client brought to me when I suggested drawing on listening skills to work through a team dispute.