Chapter 5: Leadership Skills for Every Level
I can still remember when I found out I was going to be a Quartermaster (aka Logistics) Officer. I was so nervous; the Quartermaster Branch had so many responsibilities: Warehousing, Food Service, Petroleum Operations, Water Purification; the list went on. I wondered how I would ever learn the leadership skills required for every level, role, and responsibility. In short, would I ever be a “good leader” with such diverse responsibilities?
I went to a senior mentor for advice. His answer made me feel both better and more nervous. He explained that, yes, I would learn a little about a lot of things. An inch deep and a mile wide, as the saying goes.
But what he went on to explain is that the U.S. Army is really teaching me to become an expert in leadership, not in technical expertise. Over the years, I learned that leadership takes many forms and functions, beginning with what is often referred to as team- or unit-level leadership skills. As time goes on, you learn organizational-level leadership, followed by policy or continuous organizational improvement.
The U.S. Army defines leadership as “a leader is anyone who influences people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.” But for the purpose of this series, I would like to modify it slightly. “A leader is anyone who influences people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish – you fill in the blank.”
Before we get too far into exploring the Leadership Domain, we need to talk about the U.S. Army’s Be–Know–Do leadership framework, Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes methodology, and what they are. Knowledge (or know) is what someone has gained through education, training, and experience. It’s the foundation on which all decisions are made. Skills (or Do) are the methods by which a person does something; the more skilled someone is, the better and more efficiently they perform. Attributes (or Be) are most closely associated with a person’s personality or behaviors.
By combining the definition of a leader with the definition of KSAs, we begin to get a clearer picture of what it means to be a leader. We can also see how practicing leadership can make someone a better leader, regardless of their roles, responsibilities, or position.
Please keep in mind that no list is entirely exhaustive and that leadership research continues to evolve. This list reflects the best current understanding and is aligned with U.S. Army ADP 6-22 and FM 6-22, which are foundational to this framework. This version of a KSA list is unique because it further breaks down the KSAs into basic, advanced, and mastery-level skills, which may be more relatable to industry-standard leadership levels and positions. The list below is what I’m calling a Leadership compass. It’s worth noting that a compass doesn’t dictate the path to travel, nor does it make the journey any easier. What a compass can do is make you feel more confident in your journey and, at times, keep you from getting lost. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide your path and how hard or far you want to travel. As they say, it’s not the destination; it’s the journey. Hopefully, this information will make your journey a little easier.
Below is a list of 34 Leadership Domain-specific KSAs, sorted into basic or foundational, advanced, and mastery-level elements. In combination with the 30 universal KSAs discussed in Chapter 2, these will put anyone on the path to becoming a great leader. A deeper dive into specific KSAs is available when hyperlinks are present.
What Leadership Skills Do You Need at Every Level?
Basic or Foundational Leadership Elements: Team Leadership
KNOWLEDGE
LK01 Followership and Leading Up. This is among the most overlooked areas of leadership knowledge. The dynamics of being a good follower, how to influence upward, and managing your relationship with your leader are the beginning of leadership.
LK02 Self-Knowledge. It is the understanding of one’s own values, strengths, and limitations. It includes developing an accurate awareness of how others experience your leadership and recognizing the gap between intention and impact.
LK03 Team Dynamics. Understanding how individuals interact and function collectively provides the conceptual foundation for building cohesive, resilient, and high-performing teams.
SKILLS
LS01 Active Listening. The disciplined practice of hearing intent, not just words, asking clarifying questions, and, when appropriate, echoing the message back. Repeating what you’ve heard is the most reliable way to confirm that you’ve heard and understand the message.
LS02 Building Trust. It is the ability to consistently earn and sustain the confidence of others. Trust is built through repeated behaviors and serves as the foundation for influence, collaboration, and effective leadership.
LS03 Team Empowerment. It is the ability to create the conditions in which individuals and teams can perform at their highest potential. Empowered teams demonstrate greater initiative and sustained performance.
LS04 Delivering Feedback. It’s about having an honest conversation anchored in a specific situation and behavior rather than someone’s character. Delivering feedback well is about aiming it at the behavior rather than the person, so the message has somewhere to land.
LS05 Receiving Feedback. Is seeking input about your impact and staying open rather than defensive when what you hear is uncomfortable. Receiving feedback well is measured by whether you change your behavior afterward.
LS06 Delegation. Transferring genuine authority, not just tasks, to the people doing the work, giving them real decision-making power. It means providing enough clarity and support so someone can succeed without you. Delegation succeeds when the work gets done well, and the other person grows from doing it.
ATTRIBUTES
LA01 Duty: A core value, the daily commitment to perform one’s role with excellence and integrity, extending beyond the limits of a formal job description into a moral responsibility. A leader living out Duty follows through on hard commitments even when no one is watching.
Advanced Level Leadership Elements: Organizational Leadership
KNOWLEDGE
LK04 Power, Influence and Authority. Most leadership happens without direct authority. The types of power available to leaders (positional, expert, referent, informational) and how influence operates with and without formal authority are essential knowledge for any leader.
LK05 Adult Learning and Development. Understanding how adults learn, what motivates growth, how experience shapes knowledge, and what leaders must provide to accelerate others’ development is essential to developing individuals and teams.
LK06 Succession Planning and Talent Development. How to identify high-potential individuals, structure development experiences, and prepare the organization to sustain leadership beyond any one person demonstrates organizational stewardship.
LK07 Entrepreneurial Literacy. Understanding how opportunities are recognized in gaps, inefficiencies, and unmet needs, and how resources are mobilized to turn an idea into something real. It also includes recognizing that entrepreneurship isn’t limited to founding a business; the same mindset applied within an existing organization is known as intrapreneurship, and it requires the same core capacity to spot an opportunity and evaluate whether it’s worth pursuing.
SKILLS
LS07 Entrepreneurship. Is the ability to identify opportunities and unmet needs, take initiative to pursue them, and create value. It means treating constraints and inefficiencies as signals worth acting on, mobilizing the resources available to you, and moving an idea into action. Entrepreneurship as a practiced skill isn’t reserved for founders; it shows up as intrapreneurship whenever someone inside an organization acts with the same initiative and opportunity-seeking instinct as someone building their own venture.
LS08 Recognition and Motivation. Catching people doing something right, in the moment or close to it, and expressing appreciation that’s genuine rather than performative. It means naming the specific behavior you’re recognizing, not offering generic praise, because specificity is what turns recognition into reinforcement people repeat rather than a compliment they forget by the next day. Done consistently, recognition isn’t just about making someone feel good; it’s what teaches a team.
LS09 Influencing Without Authority. Influence is persuading and motivating when you have no positional power. It means understanding what the other person values and offering something genuinely useful in return. Influence built this way compounds over repeated, sincere exchanges; influence built on manipulation or one-sided asks erodes quickly and rarely works twice.
LS10 Systems Thinking. The ability to recognize interdependencies, identify feedback loops, and view an organization as an interconnected whole rather than a set of separate departments. It means anticipating how an action in one part of the system will ripple out and create unintended consequences elsewhere.
LS11 Negotiation. Finding agreements that serve each side’s stated position rather than simply splitting the difference. Negotiation succeeds when the commitment holds up after the room empties, not when someone leaves having “won,” but when both sides have a real reason to honor what they agreed to.
LS12 Coaching. Using questions, reflection, and targeted feedback to help another person discover their own solutions and take ownership of their development. Coaching isn’t about having the right answer; it’s about holding a problem open long enough for someone else to find their own way through it.
LS13 Mentorship. A long-term, relationship-based investment in another person’s growth. It means offering the accumulated judgment from your own path directly, which is what separates this from Coaching’s more hands-off, question-driven approach. Mentorship includes putting your name behind someone when it matters, not just being available when they need to talk.
ATTRIBUTES
LA02 Composure. Maintaining steady, measured behavior under stress, even when the pressure to react visibly is real. It means projecting calm that stabilizes those around you, because a leader’s visible panic spreads through a room faster and more powerfully than their calm ever will.
LA03 Optimism. Seeing possibility in difficulty and maintaining a genuine belief that the team can succeed. Optimism that people trust isn’t the belief that things will be easy; it’s the belief that things will work out, paired with the credibility of never having lied to them about how hard it is right now.
LA04 Respect and Dignity. Treating every person as inherently worthy of value and consideration, regardless of their position or performance. Dignity is unconditional, something every person has simply by being human, and no action or failure can revoke it, while respect is earned through conduct and can be extended or withheld based on how someone behaves.
Mastery Level Leadership Elements: Continuous Organizational Improvement
KNOWLEDGE
LK08 Organizational Awareness. Understanding how organizations function means recognizing the formal structure shown on an org chart and the informal networks. It means recognizing that the formal system is built to handle predictable, routine problems, while the informal network is what activates when something unexpected happens and the formal process can’t move fast enough on its own.
LK09 Performance Systems and Accountability Structures. Understanding that measurement systems like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) only work as long as someone keeps watching them. It also means recognizing that leaders avoid holding people accountable because doing so can be uncomfortable. Both failures share the same root: a system or standard exists on paper, but nobody is willing to keep looking at it or act on what it shows, which turns a good measurement structure into a false sense of control.
LK10 Organizational Change Theory. Understanding how organizations move through change and what a leader needs to do at each stage to make change genuinely stick. It means recognizing that change fails less often because of a bad strategy and more often because of skipped steps.
LK11 Cultural Intelligence. Understanding how culture shapes what people value and how they communicate is essential for connecting a team to a shared sense of purpose across cultural lines, since a message that lands naturally in one cultural context can fail or even cause harm in another.
LK12 Mission, Vision, and Purpose. Knowing an organization’s reason for existence, the future state it’s working toward, and how your team’s work concretely connects to both. It matters because people perform differently when they understand the why behind their work. Purpose is consistently linked to sustained motivation and even long-term well-being. This knowledge enables a leader to inspire and motivate others toward organizational goals, because connecting someone’s daily work to something larger than the task itself turns compliance into genuine commitment.
LK13 Strategic Context and External Environment. Understanding the forces shaping your organization from outside its walls. This external fluency enables a leader to think strategically and offer genuinely valuable insight at every level.
SKILLS
LS14 Strategic Thinking and Planning. Connecting today’s decisions to long-range outcomes and the second- and third-order effects most people stop thinking about after the first move. It means building plans with the understanding that the plan itself will likely need to change the moment it meets reality.
LS15 Holding People Accountable. The practiced ability to notice when performance has genuinely fallen short of a stated standard. It means having a harder conversation when feedback hasn’t produced change. Holding People Accountable also starts with the discipline of regularly checking your own numbers to catch a shortfall early, since you can’t act on a standard you’ve stopped monitoring.
LS16 Vision Communication. The ability to translate a future state into a compelling narrative that inspires people to follow. It means articulating purpose and communicating a vision that creates alignment, motivation, and shared belief.
LS17 Change Leadership. Actively guiding people through transitions, explaining why the change is necessary, and addressing resistance. Change Leadership also means sustaining momentum well beyond the initial announcement.
Join us on this journey as we explore the fundamental elements of basic, advanced, and mastery-level leadership skills, as well as thoughts and ideas to grow your own.
IIf you’ve enjoyed this article, please be sure to check out the rest of this series: Preface: A Field Manual for Adult Life, Chapter 1: Why Do We Do What We Do?, Chapter 2: An Exploration of the RuReady Framework, Chapter 3: Life Skills for the Personal Domain, Chapter 4: Career Skills for the Professional Domain, and Chapter 5: Leadership Skills for Every Level.
Before moving on, feel free to use the checklist below to assess your level of readiness.
Please feel free to share your own experiences and lessons learned in the comment box below. Your shared thoughts may help someone else going through a similar experience. Thank you.
Readiness Review Checklist
Each item below is worth one point. Score yourself honestly; give yourself a point only if you can answer yes with confidence, not just in theory.
1.0 _____: Have you reflected on your leadership skills? Personal reflection is the first step in a journey to becoming a better leader.
1.0 _____: Have you reviewed and assessed yourself against a list of the leadership, Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes needed for the roles you hold? Knowing where to start is the second step in becoming a better leader.
1.0 _____: Have you asked someone close to you to assess where you stand related to the Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes you’ve identified as important to you? Asking your supervisor, husband/wife, etc., is a great place to start.
1.0 _____: Do you have a plan to practice being a better leader? Practice makes perfect, and not practicing leads to atrophy.
_____: Assessment Grade
4 = A · 3 = B · 2 = C · 1 or 0 = D
Wherever you land, this is your starting point, not your ceiling.
“Leadership is not a title…it is a choice we make every day.“
Stay Ready, My Friends.
Useful Resources:
RuReady Resources:
- Universal Leadership, Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes (KSA), Annual Focus Calendar. These are downloadable, printable pages that you can place in your planner. The intent is to use these sheets as a weekly or monthly prompt to help a person focus and reflect on leadership elements.
Self-Improvement Books, Podcasts, and Documentaries. Self-improvement is a lifelong learning process. There are thousands of excellent books, podcasts, documentaries, and interviews covering every imaginable topic. Rather than focusing on finding the “best” one, focus on resources that challenge your thinking, expand your perspective, and encourage personal growth. The format matters less than your willingness to keep learning.
Disclaimer: The information provided on this website is informational only and does not constitute professional advice or recommendation. This reflects my own experience, research, and opinions, and may not apply to your situation. There are a lot of things in life that, with a can-do attitude and a little elbow grease, we can Do It Yourself (DIY); however, there are some things that are better left to the professionals. When in doubt, please consult a professional; that’s part of being ready, too.