From Good to Great: How to Improve as a Leader in Any Career

Understanding how to improve as a leader is one of the most valuable investments you can make in your career. Leadership isn’t just for people with direct reports or lofty job titles. It’s a skill – and like any skill, it can be learned, refined, and strengthened over time.

Being a great leader today requires self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and the ability to inspire those around you. It’s also deeply personal: no two leadership journeys look the same, and improving as a leader means identifying your strengths and recognising your areas for growth.

At Farleigh, we’ve supported professionals across industries – from emerging talent to seasoned executives – with leadership development programmes that are grounded, adaptable, and authentic. In this guide, we’ll share some of the practical strategies and insights we’ve seen make the biggest difference, whether you’re just getting started or looking to take the next step in your journey.

• Why Leadership Matters in Every Career
• How to Improve Leadership Quality: Step-By-Step
• Learn From Examples of Successful Leaders
• Leverage Leadership Development
• Improving Leadership Qualities Starts Here

Why Leadership Matters in Every Career

It doesn’t matter if you’re managing people, leading projects, or simply someone others look to when things get unclear, improving leadership qualities is one of the most effective ways to accelerate your career and build long-term success.

At Farleigh, we often say that leadership is a behaviour, not a position. The ability to step forward, influence outcomes, and bring others with you – that’s leadership. And it’s needed in every role, at every level.

We’ve seen it first-hand in engineers driving collaboration across functions, in early-career professionals stepping up in high-stakes environments, and in senior managers leading with clarity through complexity. Wherever there’s pressure, competing priorities, or people working together – leadership shows up. The question is: how intentional are you about improving it?

Learning how to improve leadership quality doesn’t mean becoming someone else – it means becoming more effective at being you.

How to Improve Leadership Quality: Step-By-Step

Start With Self-Awareness

Improving as a leader starts with understanding yourself. 

Self-awareness is the foundation of effective leadership. It changes how you operate in the moments that matter: when the stakes are high, tensions rise, and others are looking to you for clarity. But, most people think they already have it.

We work with technically strong professionals who’ve hit a ceiling – not because of a lack of capability, but because something in their approach is getting in the way. The shift happens when they’re able to pause and build a more honest view of themselves, grounded in self-assessment and real feedback from others.

You need to be willing to look at both your strengths and your weaknesses – and to treat that process not as a judgement, but as the starting point for growth.

Start by asking yourself:

• What behaviours or habits do I rely on when things get tough?
• How do I tend to communicate under pressure?
• What’s one thing I avoid – and what might that be costing me?

Getting clearer on how you lead now is what opens the door to how you could lead next.

Set Clear Leadership Goals

Once you’ve got a clearer picture of how you lead today, the next step is to define where you’re trying to go. Without that, it’s easy to default to vague intentions like “be more confident” or “get better at communication” – goals that sound good, but don’t give you much to build on.

Improving as a leader requires direction. You need to know what “better” actually looks like in the context of your role, your environment, and your own leadership style.

At Farleigh, we often work with people to break their development down into focused, tangible goals. That might mean:

• Building stronger trust with your team by following through consistently 
• Creating more psychological safety in meetings by changing how you respond to challenges
• Asking better questions to open up thinking, rather than defaulting to quick answers
• Giving clearer context when setting direction, so people feel involved — not just informed
• Showing up with more intention in moments that influence organisational culture, not just project outcomes
  

Choose one or two areas of improvement that matter most right now. Set goals that reflect the leader you want to become and the culture you want to help shape. Those focused goals will create momentum far beyond the immediate task at hand.

Master the Core Leadership Skills

Once your leadership goals are clear, the question becomes: what skills will help you get there?

If you’re serious about how to improve as a leader, you need to be doing the right things, more deliberately. The leaders who grow the fastest aren’t the ones trying to master everything at once; they focus on the core behaviours that make the biggest difference to how they lead, and how others experience them.

There’s no single formula, but there are a few critical leadership skills that consistently show up in high-performing individuals:

1. Communicate with Clarity and Intent 🗣️

Leadership lives in how you communicate – especially when things get messy. Be clear about what you expect, why it matters, and what people can do with it.

That might mean:

• Saying “Here’s the decision and what it means for you” instead of vague updates.
• Giving feedback that’s direct but fair – and saying it when it matters, not just waiting for a performance review.

People respect honesty above all else. If you’re as transparent as possible, you rarely go far wrong.

2. Use Emotional Intelligence on Purpose 🧠

Self-awareness is what helps you adjust in real time – and what really sets you apart from being just another “leader.”

Keep an eye out for:

• Moments when your tone shuts a conversation down – even if your words are saying the right thing.
• Signs of hesitation or silence in a room – and whether your presence is making it easier or harder for others to contribute.
• Your own reactions under pressure – are you responding, or just reacting?

Pay attention to how people respond to you. It’s telling you something.

3. Take Accountability First ✅

Own your part, especially when things don’t go to plan.

For example:

• If the team misses a deadline, don’t deflect – ask what you could have done differently.
• If you set expectations, follow through – even when it’s uncomfortable.

Accountability builds credibility. And credibility builds trust.

4. Lead with Confidence, Not Control 🧭

Confidence in leadership comes down to how much trust you’re willing to put in your team.

That doesn’t mean stepping back and hoping for the best, you need to provide the clarity, context and backing they need to do great work without being micromanaged.

Try this:

• Set the direction, then ask “What do you need from me to get there?”
• Stay close enough to support – but not so close that you take the work off their hands.

The more trust you show, the more confidence they build. Control might get you short-term results. Confidence builds long-term capability.

5. Stay Consistent Under Pressure 🔁

Anyone can perform when things are smooth. Leadership shows up when the pressure’s on.

In practice:

• Stick to your values, even when it would be easier not to.
• Keep your tone steady in a high-stakes conversation.
• Follow through on the little things – they shape how people see you.

Discipline isn’t rigid. It’s reliable.

Identify and Develop Your Leadership Style

You already have a leadership style, whether you’ve named it or not.

It shows up in the way you make decisions, how you handle pushback, how you carry yourself in a room when things are uncertain. It’s the tone you set when you speak, and the space you give when others do.

Most people don’t stop to look at their style until something breaks. That’s usually when the questions start: Am I too direct? Too hands-off? Too guarded? Or just… not getting through.

And here’s the hard truth: what got you here won’t always take you further.

Improving leadership qualities starts with recognising when your default style – the one that’s always worked – is starting to work against you.

Maybe what used to sound confident now lands as closed.
What felt collaborative now looks indecisive.
What kept things moving now risks shutting others down.

At this point, you need to learn to stretch your style without losing yourself. That might mean:

• Leading with curiosity instead of answers
• Letting others bring the energy when you normally fill the space
• Saying the hard thing instead of smoothing it over

A good coach or mentor won’t hand you a new identity – they’ll help you see your patterns more clearly, and give you the space to try something different.

Because the goal isn’t to lead like someone else.
It’s to lead like you – with more range, more intention, and more impact.

Learn From Examples of Successful Leaders

You don’t need to look far to find advice on leadership. What’s harder to find is what it looks like when people actually do the work.

One example: our work with the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology.

At first glance, these were students. Bright, capable, technically brilliant – but early in their careers and often still forming an idea of what leadership even meant. The risk here is that they’d always associate leadership purely with seniority, authority, or being the loudest voice in the room.

Together, we built something different. A leadership development programme designed not to tell them what a “good leader” looks like, but to give them the ability to discover it for themselves.

We focused on:

• Building self-awareness early so they could lead from day one
• Developing the behaviours that build trust, influence, and follow-through
• Helping them lead themselves first 

“What I didn’t want was a run of the mill ‘here’s how to be a good leader’. We needed something that could be shaped for their roles within the Dyson Institute with an eye on their future roles in Dyson.  

Something to give them a slightly different perspective on leadership. I needed something designed for us, not off the shelf.  We got that and more from Fp.”

RUTH BURCHELL, THE DYSON INSTITUTE

It’s a powerful reminder of how to improve leadership quality: start with the human underneath the role, create the space to experiment, and offer structure without scripts. And most importantly, shift the focus from knowing the answers to asking better questions.

Leverage Leadership Development

Leadership isn’t something you “pick up” along the way. It’s something you build with the right tools and support.

When done well, leadership development programmes give people space to think differently, experiment safely, and make real shifts in how they lead. They meet people where they are and push them just far enough to grow.

But not all programmes do that. Too many are one-size-fits-all – packed with generic content that sounds good in theory but misses the mark in practice.

That’s why every programme we deliver at Farleigh is custom built.
No off-the-shelf solutions. No recycled frameworks. We co-create everything with you – shaped by your culture, your challenges, and the kind of leadership you actually need.

Whether we’re working 1:1 with a senior leader or designing a full cohort experience, our goal is the same: to help people lead in a way that’s real, repeatable, and right for their context.

If you’re wrestling with how to improve as a leader, let’s work through it together. We offer two hours of focused consultancy (free) to tackle your most pressing leadership challenge. Book a call with one of our consultants today.

Improving Leadership Qualities Starts Here

There’s no single answer to how to improve as a leader – and that’s the point.

Start by understanding how you lead today.
Where you bring clarity, and where you create noise.
Where you build trust, and where you might unintentionally break it.

Then, choose one or two things to do differently. Not all at once, just enough to create movement.

And if you want a sounding board, we’re here. At Farleigh, we support leaders, teams and organisations through that work every day – whether it be 1:1 leadership development, working with our team development consultants, or long-term culture consultancy. If something’s stuck, we’ll help you unpack it. If something’s unclear, we’ll help you shape it.