 If you get the skills you need to lead your team and accomplish your goals, let's find out. And congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Today we're going to take a little bit of a break from the deep personal reflection we've been doing and focus on something a little more straightforward and practical. And that's determining the types of skills you feel like you need to have to be an effective leader and evaluating how good you are at those skills. Now the set of skills any leader has is unique based on their mission, vision, and situation. And it's going to be up to you to determine the set of skills that you need to be an effective leader. And there are some common ones that you see among great leaders like public speaking, time management, and problem solving. And I would recommend adding these to your list to get you started. At this point you may be asking, what's the difference between a skill and a trait? And that's a really fair question because the line between them gets a little blurry sometimes. The way I look at skills is that there's something that's more like an intellectual pursuit. Something that you can learn through study and practice. Whereas a trait is something a little more internal and personal. And what requires practice to develop a trait, it's something much more emotional and requires a lot of self reflection and behavior modification to really make into a solid trait. For example, if you wanted to build a strong trait of being organized and focused, you could work on organizational skills like time management and practice those skills in order to modify your behavior to really develop those traits of being organized and focused into strong ones that are part of your leadership style. So let's do a little exercise that'll help you figure out the skills you're good at and the skills you might need to work on. I'm assuming you're already pretty good at the job you're doing now. So I want you to think about the next job you would like to have. And I want you to think about the ideal person for that job and the set of skills that that person has that makes them so good at getting that job done. So once you've got your ideal person in mind for the job that you want to have and the set of skills you feel like they need to have to be successful at it, list those skills in descending order of priority so the most important skill is at the top and the least important skill is at the bottom of your list. Don't forget about interpersonal and soft skills too such as communication or negotiation because those can be very important especially in leadership positions. Once you've got your prioritized list done, rate yourself on each of these skills from one to five. One being you need a lot of work in this skill, three meaning you're about average in it, and five meaning you're among the best people you know of at this skill. If you want to gather some additional info about how you rate on these skills, go ask a few coat workers or even your boss to rate you on these skills and factor that into your assessment as well. Now look at the top 10 skills in your list. If you've got fewer than 10, don't worry about it, just work with the list you've got. And find the two skills in your top 10 that have the lowest ratings. Also find one skill on your list that you'd be really excited about developing further. So in the example I've done here, you might choose public speaking and giving feedback for skills to work on and you might choose negotiation as a skill that really interests you that you'd want to develop further. And what we're going to have you do is focus on developing these skills for the next three months. As we've talked about before, great leaders treat leadership as a discipline to be studied and reflected upon throughout their careers and even their entire lives. One of my favorite quotes about leadership comes from John F. Kennedy and it's leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. Taking a hard look at the skills you feel like you need to advance your career as a leader and then taking action to grow and develop those skills is the best step you can take today to begin that lifelong study and practice of leadership as a discipline. Tell us in the comments what you think the most important skills for leaders to have are. And if you've got questions about doing the exercise, let us know, we'll be glad to help you out. Come back later in the week, we're going to have a blog post that talks about ways you can develop your skills, not that you've identified the ones that you want to grow. And the best way to get that, click on that globe off to the right. That'll let you subscribe to our email list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks again for watching, I really appreciate it. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.