The 5-Minute-Manager -7 qualities that make for really Great Leadership

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

Great leadership is as illusive 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 involvement of others’ and ‘recognizing accomplishments’ are important, empathy - rose to the top as the most critical driver of overall performance.

*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.