High Impact Leadership: 3 Key Attributes that Make or Break your Leadership Impact

I am a big believer in the fact that leadership plays a vital role in our growth and success. The stronger our leadership, the better we are placed to reach our potential and achieve our results, even exceed them. Yet, the reality is that not everyone is equally successful. Some individuals and organisations are more successful than others. What differentiates them is how effective their leadership is.

So how can your leadership differentiate you and put you into the league of achievers? In other words, why are some leaders more effective than others? Leadership calls for a number of attributes. However, there are 3 key attributes that define your leadership. The more you develop those attributes, the more effective you become as a leader. I like to call these attributes that define your leadership. In fact, these attributes can be make or break for your impact, and thereby your success as a leader.

Now I am not saying that other attributes are not important. However, most of the challenges leaders face can be traced down to gaps in some or all of these 3 attributes. Take any challenge, such as lack of team engagement, low productivity, lack of sales and customer engagement. Leaders who develop these attributes seem to respond to the same challenges in more effective manner than those who don’t. In my work with various leaders in organisations, this is often something that comes up. As we uncover their gaps with these attributes and work our way through, their leadership quality improves and they find themselves in a better place to create the results they are after.

So, are you ready to learn about the 3 attributes that make or break your leadership? Here we go:

Converting Vision to Reality: As a leader, do you have a clear vision and purpose? If so, do your results reflect your vision? Often, leaders struggle with this, for 2 reasons: Either they lack clarity on their vision and what they want. Or, they are unable to translate that into a clear plan of action which their team can follow. I often compare leaders to lightbulbs. Lightbulbs convert electricity to heat and light. Thanks to the lightbulb, we can clearly find our way in a room. If the lightbulb were to not work properly, we couldn’t see anything at all. We would have a rather negative experience, and would probably not like to stay in the room. Similarly, leaders convert their vision to a plan of action, goals, tasks etc that the team can follow and implement. If they fail to do so properly, the team might not be clear on what needs to be done and why. Not only do the results not match up with the leader’s expectations, this starts to impact the team’s morale. And that’s the trigger for people to leave the dark room.

Dealing with mistakes: I heard this from an influential leader once “Never walk past a mistake”. Now in a workplace, or life in general, mistakes will be made. Things will not be as you want them to be. At this point, there are 2 choices to make: Address them, or walk past them. Unfortunately, leaders often make the mistake of not dealing with a mistake. They may be too busy to notice, or they may not perceive it to be important, and procrastinate on taking action. Sometimes, they choose to cover up what’s wrong, hoping it to be a one-off. When that happens, the mistakes start accumulating. Team members do not get the feedback about things not being in order, and the same mistakes get repeated. The intensity of the mistakes build up, and when the leaders do choose to address them, they find themselves fighting fires.

Resilience: Resilience is a key buzzword for modern-day leaders, as it should be. People look to their leaders to guide them and inspire them in difficult and uncertain times. If this is something you struggle with as a leader, that can trigger panic and confusion within the team. They start losing confidence in you, as well as trust. Resilient leaders do not need to have all the answers, but have the attitude and the curiosity to find them. A quote I often think of is “We do not grow when things are easy; we grow when we face challenges”. Leaders that are resilient look at challenges, or setbacks as opportunities to grow and do things differently. And they encourage others to do so too. With that, the team actually pulls through together. A team that stays together, thrives together. And that’s an environment resilient leaders create, which makes their team well prepared to tackle challenging situations.

I trust you got a lot of valuable insights through this article. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. If you know someone who needs to be reading this, I’d encourage you to share this on. And If you struggle with any of these attributes, and would like to make a difference to your leadership, happy to have a chat.