What Are The Most Important Leadership Traits?

Traits of Effective Leaders: What Really Makes a Good Leader?

First things first. There is no single ‘most effective way to lead.

That has always been a fact but is truer than ever when considering our evolving societal understanding of the diversity we each bring to work due to our unique life experiences.

But just because ‘effective leadership’ cannot be reduced to a single formula, that does not mean we cannot study it and draw out some key learnings.

This article is about what traits make for an effective leader. No single leader will score a ’10 out of 10’ on every single one of these traits. It’s unrealistic to expect that of current leaders or yourself as an aspiring leader.

But our hope is that with this article, you can ‘bookmark’ these traits of effective leaders in your mind. If you can do that, you can begin to honestly self-assess your strengths and areas you can improve in relation to those traits. And that self-awareness and assessment will form the basis for more?effective leadership development?and learning as you move through your career.

What is leadership?

“A leader is someone who develops and influences those they lead (who each possess diverse gifts, abilities, and skills), and focuses them on bringing their skills to bear to accomplish the mission and objectives of the organization that they collectively serve.”

Leadership is one of the most studied topics in organizational, behavioral, and social research. There are literally hundreds of definitions in the academic literature.

It’s important to remember that in a field like this one, there is no single ‘right’ definition and that multiple valid theories and frameworks can inform our perspectives.

Our own preferred definition draws on the ‘integrative’ definition of leadership?as we feel it is representative of a mindset that speaks to a diverse workforce that includes marginalized people of color who may be aspiring future leaders:

Traits of Effective Leaders: Decisiveness

An effective leader is one who can make strategic decisions quickly. That doesn’t mean that they need to act without consulting anyone else. And it doesn’t mean that they need to be impulsive and without regard to risks.

?But it does mean that an effective leader needs to balance taking on diverse viewpoints and collecting valuable intelligence with a bias towards action: making a decision, setting the direction, and then trusting their direct reports to execute that decision.

But it’s important to note that decisiveness does not mean sticking to a strategy no matter what.

A famous economist once said:

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Effective leaders heed the wisdom in this quote. Being decisive does not mean never changing your mind. It means choosing a direction, and when facts and circumstances warrant a change of direction, correcting course to accept the new reality they face.

Traits of Effective Leaders: Influence

Another?effective leadership?trait is the ability to influence other people. That influence is the ‘soft skill’ that sits alongside the ‘firm’ leadership authority that comes from holding a certain job title.

Influence allows leaders to set objectives, give directions, and have their employees willingly (rather than grudgingly) work toward those goals. Or, to look at it another way, perhaps ask yourself: when have you done your best work? When you were in a job where you trusted your boss, or when you were in one where you found your manager difficult to work with?

Influence is built on the foundations of trust and empathy. Trust comes from demonstrating consistency and fairness. And empathy is demonstrated by the way in which difficult situations are dealt with and the behaviors that are modeled. Leaders that can sincerely demonstrate these behaviors gain a valuable advantage by building their ability to influence their people.

Traits of Effective Leaders: High Ethical Standards

In one survey, Three out of four employees?ranked ‘integrity’ as the most valuable quality?a leader could possess.

That’s unsurprising. In any workplace, feelings of safety, security, and trust come from the knowledge that the senior leaders of a team, business unit, division, or entire company are doing the right thing consistently. This is particularly true for those from diverse or marginalized backgrounds, who may have experiences where structural biases have negatively influenced their lives.

High ethical standards can be demonstrated in a range of business settings, including:

• Hiring practices – showing evidence that hiring, promotions, and opportunities are allocated on stated policies, merit, and evidence, rather than other factors.
• Daily interactions – modeling behaviors that are consistent with the values of the company and the employees of that company, including in the treatment of junior employees, part-time workers, and contractors.
• Boundaries – clearly articulating where the ‘line’ is in terms of business practices and then demonstrating a commitment to those practices (e.g., not reprimanding a team for not doing ‘whatever it took’ to get a contract when what it would have ‘taken’ would have been in conflict with high ethical standards).

Traits of Effective Leaders: Optimism

Failure isn’t a good or bad thing on its own. Failure resulting from a bad decision-making process is a chance to improve that process. Failure resulting from a ‘good’ risk being taken that appropriately balanced the risk versus reward ratio should be celebrated and recognized as traits of effective leaders.

But one thing is inescapable: leaders?will?make decisions that result in failure.

Any leader can be optimistic when the seas are calm and things are going well. But it’s when the seas are rough that an effective leader can shine through.

Optimism doesn’t mean discounting the difficulties or failures or pretending like they don’t exist to only paint a positive picture. That runs the risk of being ‘toxic positivity.’ Instead, the kind of optimism that an effective leader can demonstrate can include the following:

• A frank, unvarnished acknowledgment of mistakes?or challenges,
• A clear, concise articulation of the plan to correct the mistakes or solve the challenges, and,
• Using evidence from the history of the company or from external sources to demonstrate how the mistakes and challenges can be overcome and inviting employees to take ownership of the process to work through those issues.

Traits of Ineffective Leaders

So far, we’ve been focused on the most important traits for an effective, high-performing leader to possess. But it is worthwhile to briefly consider the other side of the coin as well. Some of the traits of ineffective leaders:

• Ineffective communication – messages that come from leaders need to be consistent, clear, and reinforced. Ineffective communication might stem from selectively communicating with only certain people or from issuing different instructions verbally compared to via email, leaving employees wondering what the ‘source of truth’ is.
• Reactiveness – we can all name times when events take over, and organizations have to switch to ‘firefighting’ mode. But ineffective leaders constantly treat every challenge as a crisis and cultivate a culture of reactiveness rather than effective strategic decision-making.
• Intolerance – intolerance of the ideas of others, or intolerance of a diversity of viewpoints, is a common trait of ineffective leaders and one that is often implicit, not explicit.
• Disempowerment – ineffective leaders centralize power and decision-making, often in themselves, and don’t empower others to make decisions and work towards organizational goals.

Conclusion

There is no single skill or checklist of traits that can be formulaically put together to?make a great leader. But the most effective leaders share a common set of attributes that put them in the best position to lead, inspire and motivate their people in pursuit of the goals of an organization.

We hope that after reading this piece, you have a better idea of the most important effective leadership traits and that you can see the nuance and ‘shades of grey’ in these traits.

Knowing the traits of effective leaders can be the basis for beginning your self-assessment of your strengths and weaknesses and be valuable information as you build toward your own leadership aspirations.