Are you in a leadership position but you’re still at an entry-level or junior management level? Perhaps you’ve recently been promoted to team leader and wish to advance up to a higher position overseeing the whole department? Learning to improve your leadership and management skills is an important step to advancing up the ranks.

Here are three ways to get better leadership results that will allow you to get promoted from within.

Empower the Team, Carefully

Giving your direct reports the ability to make executive decisions on smaller matters is a useful way to let them take responsibility and keep the department on track. You want to determine what actions are within the capabilities of the team (and individual team members) and which are not. You don’t want staff going beyond their bounds to where you should be taking the lead.

Empowering your team is a great way to give staff confidence in their own abilities, which improves morale and staff retention rates. Choose key moments to step in to provide leadership lessons that will improve the results achieved. Don’t be afraid to re-train staff who lack the necessary skills to complete tasks effectively.

Listen Well and Resolve Conflicts Decisively

To be a good leader and manager, you first need to learn the art of listening to others. Most of us much prefer to talk and not listen. However, to understand a problem clearly from one or more sides, it’s necessary to listen to what staff want to share with you. When a conflict arises between two employees on your team, you’ll need to listen to what both people have to say, understand where the conflict or misunderstanding lies, decide how to resolve it quickly, and be decisive about what happens next.

Letting a disagreement fester is terrible for productivity and morale within the team. In such situations, you cannot be everyone’s friend or a shoulder to cry on. You need to get to the heart of the problem quickly, resolve it, and move on before it begins to interfere with larger business objectives. Wherever possible, determine if there is a change that can be made to ensure the same conflict doesn’t reoccur, whether that means staff training, a change in policies, or a rearrangement of where certain staff sit to let things simmer down.

Improve Your Executive Leadership Through Education

When you want to take your leadership and management seriously, it’s time to consider an executive leadership masters qualification. The multi-year course covers many different disciplines relating to leadership qualities, team management, handling challenges in the real world, and how to lead effectively to engender trust from others.

The executive leadership masters online is a program of study that allows busy executives to learn in the evenings and at the weekend, at a time that suits their schedule. There’s no need to leave a current position to embark on this course, which makes it ideal for people who already have a demanding job.

Getting into a leadership position at a junior level is one thing, but advancing up the ranks is another thing entirely. What got you there probably won’t help you rise any higher. For this reason, it’s a good idea to adopt the idea of continual improvement because it’ll be necessary to advance any further.