7 Qualities you need to be a Great Leader

Leadership - One of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth. James Burns.

Great leadership is as elusive as it is important, here are seven qualities that I have recognised in the many great leaders that I have known.

1.?? Leadership Style

Someone who is supportive and forgiving has a positive, infectious attitude and an open-door policy. Someone who is easy to talk to, who provides challenging work, builds effective teams, has genuine empathy and practices open communication and active listening. A great leader cares about and develops their team, they are a role model, and their team members aim to emulate their style, a style that radiates positivity, charisma, and emotion, with an energy that infects those around them for the better. A great leadership style promotes engagement and makes people feel comfortable about approaching with questions, suggestions, and ideas, it is a style that fits the person’s personality. It allows the person to focus more on exercising their strengths and achieving their goals.

A great leadership style is a description of the way a person thinks and acts. It tells people what they should expect from that person in any given situation. It is a personalised statement based on a work persona that the person wants to project. Great leaders develop teamwork, they know they need to spend time with their teams, talk to them, understand them, and learn what they care for individually. They motivate others to do more than they thought possible. Great leaders set challenging expectations and typically their teams achieve higher performance outcomes.

2.?? Charisma

To appear as charismatic and energise those around you, you need to demonstrate gusto, be curious, have a positive and upbeat attitude and communicate high expectations. Being viewed as charismatic is a powerful leadership tool, it encourages team members to trust in an ideology and beliefs. It brings about unquestioning acceptance and affection of the leader, it promotes team member obedience and emotional involvement with the leaders’ goals, helping to create a shared vision of the future.

?We have a love of charismatic individuals, particularly since the explosion of mass media in the 1960s.?Some of the most successful leaders in the world are known for their charisma. But while charisma has been associated with extroversion, drive, and even more physically attractive features, it?is hard to define and measure, and it exists largely in the eye of the beholder.?Charisma clouds people's evaluations of how leaders actually perform. Rather than being objective, we are less judgmental about a leaders' performance when we see them as charismatic, and we are more critical when we don't.

3.?? Confidence and Competence

We have a basic inability to distinguish between confidence and competence.?Confidence is often disguised and falsely perceived as a leadership competency. Most people look at a confident person and assume the person is also competent, however, there is in fact no relationship between confidence and competence whatsoever. Competence?is how good you are at something. Confidence is how good you?think?you are at something. Decades of research suggest that on virtually any dimension of ability, we tend to assume that our leaders are better than they actually are. While confidence is good to have, overconfident leaders, overrate their ability and job performance, and are more prone to reckless decisions because a common downfall is that they are immune to negative feedback.?There are four types of confidence/competence parallels: 1. Un-confident/Incompetent - These leaders persist in the background concerned about being discovered. 2. Confident/Incompetent - These leaders can lure an organization off a cliff with their misguided confidence. 3. Un-confident/Competent - These are the workhorses of any organization - they work hard in the background, lacking the confidence it takes to be at the forefront of recognition and 4. Confident/Competent – These are the ones you want, the ambitious achievers. They have struck a healthy balance between competence and confidence with the latter rising just ahead of the former.

4.?? Skills

The most fundamental type?required is ‘Technical skills that are specific to the leader’s job. Next, come Interpersonal skills?- verbal and non-verbal. To succeed at a high level in life a great leader needs to have writing, speaking, presentation, communication, and body language skills. Then there are psychological skills?which are perhaps the most important type of skills to have; the ability to show real concern for others and knowing how to show that concern in interactions with others is perhaps the most important – namely the psychological skill of emotional intelligence. Other psychological skills include the ability to help others develop and grow, the ability to create harmony in difficult situations and the ability to know how to motivate others. By developing psychological skills, great leaders increase the motivation and energy of those around them.

?Unique skills are a feature of great leaders causing them to stand out among the crowd. Great leaders understand that performing a skill over and over, makes it becomes almost second nature, i.e., a habit. As the skill becomes more integrated into their being it moves from conscious awareness of performing the act involved in the skill down into a subconscious level where it operates on an almost ‘automatic pilot’. Great leaders do this without any great effort and do it with a sense of calm and joy.

5.?? Narcissism

A degree of narcissism (you might say a healthy degree) is not a bad thing; positive narcissism spurns positive arrogance, and positive arrogance is a great motivator. We all have an innate inability to resist the allure of narcissistic individuals, and most great leaders are a narcissist, in one shape or another. They can be the ones who know the best way to do everything (and must tell you about it in incredible detail), or they can be the ones that crave praise more than caffeine and can put the ‘me’ into meetings. They may be the ones with typically grandiose visions that tap into our own narcissism. According to Randall S Peterson, a professor at the London Business School who studies?narcissists in the workplace “the most important thing to them is how they look and how they’re seen.”

Out of control, narcissists agree with statements like “superiority is something you are born with” and “I always know what I’m doing.” They may rush to assist in every situation - even ones they know nothing about - because they live to help - they believe that they are ‘the most helpful person I know. Their biggest problem is that they are usually reluctant to give credit to others, making sure their own contributions are always recognized. Narcissism, however, encourages you to give a talk, stand up for what you believe in, and do things you otherwise would not take on. Therefore, a healthy dose of it is not necessarily a bad thing – as it helps to build self-efficacy and confidence.

6.?? Delegates based on Strengths

Strengths are a person’s natural talents, things you are born with (as against skills – which are learned). Great leaders understand that delegation involves assessing team members’ motives and strengths, satisfying their needs, and valuing them. Team members who are both managed and deployed according to their strengths and who are paired in the same way have substantially increased job satisfaction, achieve higher levels of professional growth, and produce superior, more positive outcomes. Great leaders know that delegating based on a person’s strengths develops them, and that monitoring to see if the team member needs additional direction or support assists with progress. Great leaders expect and set higher performance outcomes from their team members by giving them stretched goals and setting more challenging expectations outside of a team member’s normal comfort zone. In doing so they help to create a culture of clear accountability. A great leader will always ask “will this work help the team member develop their skills, and will it employ their strengths?”.

7.?? Empathy

To better grasp what we mean when we talk about empathy, we are referring to the type of empathy where we directly feel what others feel, where we imagine ourselves in others' shoes and where we imagine the world, or a situation, from someone else's point of view rather than our own. Then there is ‘mind reading’ - being good at reading others' emotions and body language. Great leaders effortlessly do these four things, they are naturally attuned to them. Global training giant Development Dimensions International (DDI) has studied leadership for 46 years. They assessed over 15,000 leaders from more than 300 organizations across 20 industries and 18 countries to determine which conversational skills have the highest impact on overall performance. The findings revealed that while skills such as ‘encouraging the involvement of others’ and ‘recognizing accomplishments’ are important, empathy - rose to the top as the most critical driver of overall performance. Specifically, the ability to listen and respond with empathy.?Empathy in the modern workplace is not just about being able to see things from another perspective, it's the cornerstone of teamwork, good innovative design, and smart leadership. It's about helping others feel heard and understood. The ability to empathize, as a leader, makes a substantial difference in the performance of others.

Gender

The fact that so many leaders are male has much more to do with social factors (people’s expectations, cultural norms, and opportunities) than actual gender differences in leadership potential, which are?virtually non-existent. In fact, some studies have shown that women are slightly more effective as leaders on the job, but this may be because the standards for appointing women to leadership positions are higher than those for appointing men, which creates a surplus of incompetent men in leadership positions. The solution is not to get women to act more like men, but to select leaders based on their actual competence. We should promote people because of competence, humility and integrity which would incidentally lead to a higher proportion of female than male leaders - large-scale scientific studies show that women score higher than men on measures of competence, humility, and integrity. But the point is that we would significantly improve the quality of our leaders.

People leave managers not companies

Early in my career, I did exactly that, I resigned from a fantastic management position because I could no longer have a professional relationship with my manager. I didn’t want to leave, the company had been extremely good to me, they invested in me and took a risk by giving me a major project at a young age. There was no doubt that I was destined for greater things. Yet, stressed and not wanting to - I resigned. Why? Because I had a manager I didn’t trust, I found I couldn’t maintain a professional working relationship, and I was continually being undermined.

?During my career, I lost very few employees, so I consider that I was doing something right. Yet when the question is put to people “what do you think about your manager?” 82% answer in the negative, so reflecting on the above eight leadership qualities, you can see what the majority of managers are doing wrong? There are many employees who are dissatisfied with their jobs, feeling economically trapped, angry, frustrated, and unable to better their situation. Lack of the eight leadership qualities in team leaders, supervisors, managers, and leaders tell us why.

Common reasons why people resign:

·?????? Poor management/leadership.

·?????? Lack of advancement.

·?????? Insufficient remuneration.

·?????? Boredom, low job satisfaction.

·?????? Poor workplace culture, lack of respect.

·?????? Better opportunity.

Common reasons given about bad managers:

·?????? Incompetence.

·?????? Poor communicator.

·?????? Poor listener.

·?????? Rude, abrupt, arrogant, humiliating.

·?????? Shows no interest.

Common thoughts given by bad managers about their employees:

·?????? Incompetent.

·?????? Lazy.

·?????? Will not follow directions or procedures.

·?????? Shows no interest.

Common attributes of poor organizations:

·?????? See their employees as units of labour, easily replaceable and not worth investing in.

·?????? Do not train their mid-level managers.

·?????? Vests a lot of power in managers, allowing them to impose their form of control, rules, and regulations.

·?????? Managers are intimidating people in positions of power who are coercive, dictatorial and distrusting.

A research study on American employees from Gallup found that 50% resign due to bad management. The study continues to show that having a ‘bad’ boss creates unhappiness in the office, adding stress and spreading negativity to their home life and families. Finally, workers feel like they’re given little guidance as to what’s expected of them.

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