Great leaders prioritize growth and embrace learning. Great leaders are also thoughtful and strategic about their next steps. To sharpen your leadership skills, whether you’re a new manager or a seasoned executive, take some time to consider and cultivate the following five behaviors.

Taking these actions can supercharge your performance and widen your influence as a leader.

1. Seek the Future

Your first duty as a leader is to envision and communicate a compelling picture of a preferred future. To create this vision, consider the following questions:

What do I want our organization (team, group) to accomplish? What would it look like? How would we measure our success?

• What do I want to be true in the future that is not true today?
• What makes others care about this preferred future?

You may not be able to see the future but when you share a compelling vision, it can stir passion within your team. It tells everyone who you are, where you are going, and the values that will drive your behavior. It helps your team feel comfortable and confident as they help you make that vision a reality.

Along the way, return to these questions periodically if you need to reimagine your vision so that you can clearly communicate it to others.

2. Engage and Develop Others

To begin engaging and developing your team, consider the following:

What are the behaviors I’d be seeing if my team members were engaged?

• In the past, what factors have led me to be fully engaged?
• Which of these factors are missing for my team members? What do they need to be more engaged?
• How can I help my team members grow, both as a group and individually?

Engagement is essential to success. As people’s engagement level rises, so does the team’s probability of success. Helping your team members grow and enabling better team collaborations may take time away from your other projects, yet doing so will pay huge dividends in the long run.

Remember to tailor your support to each team member. One size doesn’t fit all—people have specific and unique engagement and development needs. Give individual team members the attention they require.

3. Reinvent Continuously

Progress is impossible without change. To improve as a leader, ask yourself these key questions:

What can I improve?

• What is my development focus for the next 12 months?
• In which arena do I want a different outcome?
• What needs to change to make that desire a reality?
• What structural changes could be made to accelerate my progress and the progress of my team?

Not pursuing and embracing new ideas leads to stagnation in people and organizations. To stay relevant and effective as a leader, challenge yourself and your team to tackle new projects, develop new skills, and evolve.

4. Value Results and Relationships

The best leaders generate measurable results and at the same time cultivate great relationships with those they lead. Focusing on both results and relationships leads to a high-performing team and expands your influence as a leader. To assure that you’re giving sufficient attention to results and relationships, ask the following questions:

What happens if I overvalue results?

• What happens if I overvalue relationships?
• Which is my personal bias as a leader: results or relationships?
• How can I compensate for the area that’s not my natural strength?
• How can my team help me in this area?
• What will be the consequences if I don’t broaden my definition of success?

5. Embody Your Values

People watch leaders and learn from their example. That’s why your credibility is key. Leadership is built on trust. A powerful way to build trust as a leader is to live consistently with the values you profess. Ask yourself these key questions:

What values or beliefs do I want to be driving the behavior of my team members?

• How can I communicate those values?
• Which of these values do I most consistently model?
• Which of these values do I need to work on?
• What are my actions communicating?

Make a conscious effort to notice how your behavior is either reinforcing or betraying your stated values, and adjust accordingly. The goal is to “walk your talk” by living in a way that is consistent with your values.