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According to the Great Eight competencies, leading and deciding means taking control, exercising leadership, initiating action, giving direction, and taking responsibility.
In the workplace, a good leader knows when to decide, when to consult their team members or peers and get their opinion on a particular matter, and, most importantly, when to step back and let others decide.
Leading and Deciding in the Workplace
Leading and deciding is a crucial skill for an employee in the workplace. Bartram and Kurz noted that extraversion is correlated with leading and deciding. An employee with high extraversion is interested in people and interacts with others often. This individual is a consummate team-first person and a “doer.”
Being a decision-maker in the workplace is also vital because it allows an employee to accurately assess a situation and determine how the organization may proceed. The decision-making process involves identifying the challenge, devising solutions, weighing options, making a choice, and informing others of this decision.
Additionally, influential leaders can communicate well, motivate their team, handle and delegate responsibilities, listen to feedback, and have the flexibility to solve problems in an ever-changing workplace.
The top 10 leadership skills an individual can possess include communication, motivation, delegating, positivity, trustworthiness, creativity, feedback, responsibility, commitment, and flexibility.
How is Leading and Deciding a Learnable Trait?
Leaders aren’t always born with the skills needed to lead others. Many acquire these traits through experience and education. An individual’s ability to lead others depends on social, environmental, and psychological factors and through observation, experimentation, and effort.
The vast majority of leadership is learned. Individuals with a high tolerance for failure are the ones who can get up and try to demonstrate leadership and participate in activities where they learn leadership lessons from others.
As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi once said, "Leaders are made; they are not born,"
Similarly, decisiveness and indecisiveness can certainly be learned behavior. For example, Individuals raised in environments where decision-making is seen as an opportunity to learn and grow tend to feel more comfortable making choices.
Talent Select AI measures the Big Five personality traits and the Great Eight competencies because most jobs require those traits or some subset of them.
In a recent interview, Emily Campion, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Management & Entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa, told Talent Select AI, “Using word dictionaries to capture a candidate's either big five personality or great eight competencies, such as leading and deciding or adapting and coping, makes great sense in the hiring context.”
“We know from the literature that these attributes contribute to our ability to perform,” explains Dr. Campion, “So we know that the Big Five personality traits, particularly conscientiousness, can predict our performance.”
Talent Select AI uses natural language processing (NLP) to quickly and accurately measure candidates’ personality traits and core skills, including the Great Eight Competencies, the Big Five (OCEAN) Personality Traits, and our own proprietary measures, such as Grit, Empathy, and Proactiveness.
Contact us today to see how we do it.
