What The Qualities Of A Good Leader – Although there is no right way to effectively lead a team, there are some common characteristics among successful leaders and managers that you should consider when developing your leadership skills.
Integrating these skills into your professional development can help you make tough decisions, align your organization with common goals, and lead your team to success.
What The Qualities Of A Good Leader
Ineffective leadership can cost a company more than morale. According to Gallup research, 24 percent of active employees are disengaged as a result of poor management, resulting in teams that are less productive, less profitable, and more likely to cause turnover. And the turnover that adds up quickly: It translates to almost twice the annual salary of each employee who quits.
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This is why effective leadership skills are important. To retain employees, satisfy customers, and increase company productivity, you need someone who can effectively communicate the company’s vision, lead teams, and influence change.
“[Leadership] is about influencing people,” said Kirstin Lynde, founder of leadership development firm Catalyze Associates, in a Facebook Live interview.
Early in your career, you can exercise authority by being the go-to person on certain topics in your organization, or by actively listening and building consensus among your team. As you move forward, you can exert influence by knowing how to articulate the direction you think your company should take next.
According to the Power and Influence for a Positive Impact Course, influence is “the ability to produce an effect on the behavior of others.” Influencing others requires building strong trust with your colleagues.
Leadership Qualities Of A Good Leader: Characteristics Of A Leader
“This means that you need to understand the type of resources that people rely on when it comes to security and self-esteem,” said Julie Battilana, a professor at Harvard Business School, in the Power and Influence for Positive Impact course.
Focus on understanding their motivations and encourage them to share their opinions. You can use that knowledge to make a difference and show that your voice matters.
Part of building trust is being transparent. The more open you are about the organization’s goals and challenges, the easier it is for employees to understand their roles and how they can contribute to the company’s success. That sense of value and purpose translates into higher levels of employee engagement.
“For people to come in, they need to understand what you’re talking about, so they’ll be happy to join you in making that direction a reality,” says HBS professor Anthony Mayo in his Organizational Leadership course. “Your communications need to meet people where they are, give them a sense of where the organization is going, and then provide a road map of how they can close the gap from where the organization is now to where they want to take it.”
Characteristics And Qualities Of A Good Leader
While transparency is often intended to promote collaboration, knowledge sharing and accountability, too much can have the opposite effect, according to Ethan Bernstein, associate professor of organizational behavior at HBS.
“Open workspaces and a wealth of real-time data about how people spend their time can make employees feel exposed and vulnerable,” Bernstein wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “Seeing it changes your behavior. “He started doing everything he could to keep it a secret, even though he had nothing to hide.”
Bernstein advocates balancing transparency with privacy and setting different types of boundaries to continue to encourage experimentation and collaboration.
Experimentation is essential to establishing and maintaining your company’s competitive edge. Great leaders recognize this and encourage risk taking and innovation in their organizations.
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“You can’t wave a magic wand, dictate that people should be more creative, and wake up the next day to find people taking risks and trying new things,” said Mayo in Organizational Leadership.
Instead, leaders must actively foster a culture of innovation by supporting experimentation, challenging unwritten rules, and resolving mistakes. These steps, backed by data, can lead to innovations that would otherwise not have appeared.
By creating a culture that embraces failure and experimentation, employees are more motivated to test theories or come up with new ideas, because they see that creativity is valued. For example, Google’s innovation lab, of course”.
After all, breakthroughs don’t come when companies play it safe; Experimentation is required to achieve lofty business goals. When failure is well-intentioned, it often becomes an important lesson.
Overview Skills Qualities Good Leader Stock Illustration 1318865561
One of the most important aspects of leadership is demonstrating integrity. In a survey conducted by consulting firm Robert Half, 75 percent of employees rated “integrity” as the most important attribute in a leader. In a separate survey conducted by Sunnie Giles, creator of Quantum Leadership, 67 percent of respondents ranked “high moral standards” as the most important leadership competency. However, it can be easy for leaders to lose their integrity in the face of organizational power. The ability to balance power and accountability can differentiate successful leaders from ineffective ones.
“It’s really these two levers (sharing power and responsibility) that allow workplaces and communities to maintain power,” Battilana says in Power and Influence for Positive Impact.
Employees want to know that their managers will stand up for them, treat them fairly, and ultimately do what is right for the business. As a leader, it is important not only to avoid consolidation of power but also to make decisions that may affect others. Doing so can build trust in your team and model the behavior of others in the organization. The culmination of these factors can help you build a successful team.
In today’s complex and rapidly changing business environment, effective leaders must make strategic decisions quickly, even before definitive information is available.
Infographic] The Anatomy Of A Great Leader
Once you’ve made up your mind, stick with it, unless there’s a compelling reason to change your approach. Your goal is to move the organization forward, but that won’t happen if you can’t make decisions without hesitation.
While making timely decisions is essential for effective leaders, it is important to remember that decision making is a process.
“Most people think of decision making as an event,” HBS professor Len Schlesinger says in his Essentials of Management course. “It is rare to find a moment when an ‘important decision’ is made and everything can move forward. What we are talking about is the process. The role of the manager to oversee the process is simple but, at the same time, very complex.
By acting decisively, constantly evaluating, and pivoting when necessary, you can lead your organization through an ever-changing business landscape.
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Every decision you make will not result in success. There will be times when you will encounter failure; It is your job as a leader to practice resilience.
Consider the example of Antarctic explorer Ernest Schackleton presented in the HBS Model Business Lessons on Resilient Leadership, led by HBS Professor Nancy Koehn.
When Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, is trapped and crushed by an iceberg, its original mission (crossing Antarctica) suddenly becomes irrelevant. The new mission is to keep a team of 28 people alive. To do this, he must quickly lead the team through the crisis.
The lesson describes three key components of Shackleton’s approach that all leaders can learn from when faced with major challenges:
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Effective leaders do not avoid hard truths or difficult challenges. Instead, he took responsibility for his decisions, remained optimistic, and focused on creating a new plan of action. They also help others navigate organizational change and solve problems quickly, so problems don’t escalate or escalate.
Being an effective leader does not happen overnight. This is an iterative process and requires you to assess your strengths and evaluate who you are as a communicator and collaborator.
“In many cases, strong performance is the individual contributor that lays the foundation for your leadership role,” Mayo says in his Principles of Leadership course. “But what gets you there doesn’t take you to the next level. When you move from doing your own work to creating situations where others excel, your identity has less to do with individual accomplishments and tasks and more to do with the collective work of the group .
With these changes, you can take steps to develop your leadership style and become the type of leader your organization needs.
Leadership Qualities & Characteristics Of A Good Leader
Do you want to improve your leadership skills? Download our free leadership ebook and explore the flowchart to see leadership and management courses that can help you become a more effective leader and unleash your and others’ potential.
Lauren Landry is the director of marketing and communications at Harvard Business School. Before joining HBS, he worked at Northeastern University and BostInno, where he wrote nearly 3,500 articles on technology and early-stage education, including HBS’s own launch. When he’s not at HBS, you can find him teaching a digital media course at Emerson College, drinking coffee, or telling anyone who will listen a corny joke. Leadership is an important element in any organization and its importance can be seen in the results achieved by a successful team or company. Leaders must possess certain key qualities to lead and influence others effectively.
This includes strengthening your team, engaging in meaningful relationships
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