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Article history: Received: May 17, 2019 Received in revised format: June 22 2019 Accepted: June 23, 2019 Available online: June 23, 2019 Leaders are essential for the survival and development of businesses and they can affect and inspire employees, colleagues and other people to dedicate to the company. Among factors associated with leaders, leadership skills are considered as the most important characteristics because leadership skills are the abilities to perform tasks, transform knowledge into leaders' actions and demonstrate the leadership's expertise when applying the acquired knowledge in practices to achieve desired performance. This article focuses on studying the effects of leadership skills on the performance of Vietnamese textile and garment companies, which is one of the most important industries of this developing country. To achieve the objectives of this study, this article uses quantitative approach with various statistical techniques; namely, Cronbach's Alpha, EFA and CFA, SEM to analyze the primary data with SPSS and AMOS software and to test the hypotheses. The results show that strategic skills had the greatest impacts on the performance of Vietnamese textile and garment enterprises followed by interpersonal and business skills. Cognitive skills had the weakest effects on the performance of Vietnamese textile and garment enterprises. Thus, to enhance performance, leaders should improve and develop these skills. This study does not show possible differences in gender, age, experience and position of leader in this relationship, which is considered as the limitation of the survey. Leadership skills affect positively the performance of Vietnamese textile and garment enterprises. The order of the most influencing factors are: strategic skills, interpersonal skills, business skills, and cognitive skills. © 2019 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada