Each weekday, in our Management Tip of the Day newsletter, HBR offers daily tips to help you better manage your teams and yourselves. Here are 10 of our favorite tips from 2024.

8 Leadership Skills to Develop

Leadership isn’t a quality you either innately possess or lack; it’s the sum of eight skills you can develop over time. Here are the characteristics that will help you become recognized as a leader.

Authenticity. Work to build self-awareness and put yourself in positions to highlight your strengths and improve on your weaknesses.

Curiosity. Ask questions about what you don’t know. Think expansively and ambitiously. Present as someone who constantly wants to learn, explore, and innovate.

Analytical thinking. Leadership requires the ability to break down complex problems, identify their root causes, and come up with fresh solutions. Develop your analytical skills by focusing on cause-and-effect relationships and being attentive to patterns and trends.

Adaptability. Take on assignments and seek out experiences that demand flexibility. Push yourself to work in new environments with different kinds of people.

Creativity. You don’t necessarily need to come up with every great idea on your own. Sometimes it’s about establishing an environment that nurtures creativity in others.

Comfort with ambiguity. Managing ambiguity is about holding conflicting ideas in your head and dealing with competing priorities that feel equally important. Ask a lot of “what ifs” and “so whats,” and scrutinize matters from different perspectives.

Resilience. When things get tough, exhibit the resilience to recalibrate, regroup, and get input from others by asking, “Is there another path?”

Empathy. Developing your emotional intelligence gives you a deeper appreciation of the complex challenges others are working through — and helps you foster a more supportive and nurturing environment.

This tip is adapted from “8 Essential Qualities of Successful Leaders,” by Rebecca Knight

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Create an Effective Slide Deck

A great presentation depends on more than the high-quality information you’re sharing. Here are some essential principles to help you create a memorable slide deck.

Choose the right fonts. Use sans serif fonts like Helvetica or Arial for a minimal look and better readability. Stick to two font styles throughout your presentation — one for headings and another for body text — and ensure consistency throughout. Keep the body text at a minimum of 30-point size and titles at 40 points or more.

Opt for high-contrast colors. High-contrast color combinations ensure maximum visibility and ease of reading. Limit your color palette to two or three main colors to avoid visual confusion and maintain focus on your key points.

Use pictures effectively. Select images that communicate your message powerfully and succinctly — and use them sparingly. Limit yourself to one meaningful image per slide to maintain clarity and reinforce your message without distracting from the substance.

Aim for a clean layout. Avoid clutter by using a simple layout with plenty of white space. Emphasize key points in bulleted lists rather than paragraphs. And use a visual hierarchy to guide the audience’s attention to the most important elements first.

This tip is adapted from “How to Make a ‘Good’ Presentation ‘Great’” by Guy Kawasaki

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The Traits You Need to Build Executive Presence

Aspiring leaders have long been told they need “executive presence” to be considered for senior roles. Traditionally this has boiled down to three attributes: gravitas, strong communication skills, and the “right” appearance. But what does that look like today? A recent survey sheds light on how our views have changed over the last decade.

Gravitas. To project gravitas, you need to seem confident, decisive, and have a clear vision. But an increasingly important element of gravitas is being inclusive — not only hiring people with diverse backgrounds and giving everyone a fair shot at climbing the ladder, but also ensuring that all your employees feel respected and supported.

Strong communication skills. Communicating well has always entailed speaking and writing clearly and an ability to command the room. In the new world of work, commanding the Zoom (or other forms of virtual meetings) is just as important. To communicate with executive presence today also requires listening and learning — rather than communicating with force.

The “right” appearance. Appearance is the least-important attribute, but it’s the one that has changed the most from 2012 to 2022. Authenticity, which didn’t register with survey respondents 10 years ago, is newly prized. To be seen as leadership material today, executives are expected to reveal who they fundamentally are — not mimic some dated, idealized model of what it means to be “professional.”

This tip is adapted from “The New Rules of Executive Presence,” by Sylvia Ann Hewlett