The Evolution of a Leadership Toolkit

“Leadership is an ever-evolving position.” Mike Krzyzewski

Leadership has always been my thing – I love it. I read about it, study, it, breathe it, do it. Every day. What I love about leadership is that it is something that requires you to continuously change. The leader that I am today will only work at this moment in time, but in the next moment, the leader that I am now may not be effective. As such, my leader toolkit continues to evolve and I am always delighted when I come back to a tool that was effective in the past, that may be something beneficial for the current moment.

I always encourage others, and challenge myself, to continually find different tools to add to my leader toolkit. For me, that means reading a lot of books, watching webinars, attending workshops, and engaging with my peers in a meaningful way. I get to have incredible conversations with leaders across my organization and external to my organization, all of whom provide perspective, experience, and insight that I don’t have on my own.

What is a leadership toolkit? When we hear the phrase, we intuitively know, but when we take the time to actually define it, we are able to better see how to build it, maintain it, and continue to develop it. Your leadership toolkit is the skills, capabilities, frameworks, and experiences that make up who you are as a leader. Every leadership “rep” you have builds this toolkit. This doesn’t necessarily mean that those with more time in leadership roles have a bigger or better toolkit – toolkits are effective because we know how to use them. We try different things in new situations, learn from those things, and reflect to make sure we get the most out of the lesson.

As you are considering how to build or maintain your leadership toolkit, regardless of where you are in your leader journey, think about the different things you have used when times got tough; those times that you were in a situation where you were unsure of the next step – what did you lean on?

Skills are an easy place to start. What skills do you currently have that are proven? Proven means that you have demonstrated these skills in a way that the results of your actions can speak to your ability to flex that skill. What skills are you not as strong in? How can you put yourself in new situations to be able to build or flex that skill in more scenarios?

Skills can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and these can include the very tangible to the very intangible. Strategic planning is an important skill for leaders to have, and it is something that can be easily measured. Emotional intelligence is a vital skill for leaders to possess, and it can be a bit more difficult to measure. Either way, these skills can be built by putting yourself in different and new situations with new challenges and new people.

For me, frameworks are a tool that I rely on consistently. The great thing about frameworks is that there are thousands of them designed for a variety of situations. When you are stuck, look up your situation and “frameworks” and you will find so many options. This doesn’t mean you have to use the framework exactly; this could be an incredible starting point to get you moving towards a solution and execution.

Books by thought leaders in the business and leadership space are another great way to build your toolkit. If you read 100 leadership books, you may find that they are saying some version of the same thing. The beauty of this is that they will give you multiple ways to view or communicate an idea, better preparing you to communicate and explain a concept well so you can get people to buy into the next steps.

Sometimes, we think about building our leader toolkit in the context of our current position or previous professional roles. There are a lot of ways that we can build this toolkit outside of our revenue-generating jobs. Volunteer positions are consistently a great way to develop leadership skills – especially because there are very different stakes in volunteer leadership.

Podcasts and webinars can provide great perspective and insights, especially if you listen to ones where people are sharing both concepts and experiences around a topic. The experiences that people share are what make a concept real, tangible, and potentially a tool for you to use as well.

Ultimately, when you are building your leader toolkit, you want to think about it as broadly as reasonable. What experiences would provide you with more perspective? What skills would be beneficial for the next level of leadership that you want to attain? Who else could you connect with that will give you insight?

Check out my website for my latest leadership resources and check out my YouTube page for my latest podcast episodes and #FrameworkFridays!