Here are 12 leadership attributes that psychologists have identified as the building blocks for the best. How many do you regularly employ?
It’s often assumed that leaders are born and not made. Not so. Leadership skills can be learned. And guess what? The more you practice, the better you get.
These 12 attributes of a leader are the building blocks of our Next Level Leader programme. It gets people to adopt leadership behaviours in their everyday work over a number of weeks, giving the insights, confidence and capability to become a leader of the future.
Enhance your leadership skills today. Pick one attribute from the list below – perhaps one you know is not your strong point – and do something positive about it.
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Accountability
The best leaders understand that the buck stops with them. They take equal responsibility for failure, as well as success. Not only that, they understand where the accountability lies in their team. What can you do to improve your own accountability? List three things that matter in your job. Put them on a sticky in front of you. Explain to colleagues what they are and why they matter. Try to make a difference for those three things all week. At the end of the week, tell everyone where you succeeded and where you didn’t. Most importantly, write down what you have learned.
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Positive reinforcement
Being a leader is about bringing people along with you. And whilst it may be necessary to tell people when things are not right, what the best leaders do is encourage people when they do things well. B.F Skinner, a behavioural psychologist in the US pioneered experiments on Positive Reinforcement that showed that rewards for positive actions result in faster behaviour change. Just looking for the positive in your own work as well as other people’s can be the start of creating a positive culture around you.
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Empowering others
What often separates a great worker from a great leader is the ability to delegate. The best leaders are able to detach themselves from the everyday and concentrate on enabling and facilitating others. That means learning to trust other people to do vital tasks. If you’re someone who finds delegation difficult here’s a useful trick. Find out the tasks your team enjoy doing most and delegate a task that’s squarely in their comfort zone. Then expand from there, as your trust and their confidence grows.
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Emotional intelligence
Emotions are extremely complex, and yet our ability to perceive and manage them is a key contributor to success. Our programme for Developing emotional intelligence is a great way to help your people improve their EI. One of the approaches in that programme is to be more in-tune with our own emotions. You could try that today. Just monitor how you feel. Tell someone at work. Ask them how they feel. Remember, great leaders aren’t afraid to engage with emotions.
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Talent Management
In its 2014 Global Talent Management and Rewards Study, researchers at Wills Towers Watson found that just 33% of employers say managers are effective at conducting career development discussions as part of the performance management process. Indeed, trust and confidence in senior leadership was among employees’ top three reasons for staying with an organisation – and yet it does not even rank in the top seven for employers. Great Leaders take time to find out what’s important to their top performing people. If you haven’t done that for a while, perhaps now is the time.
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Communication skills
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
George Bernard Shaw.
In the electronic whirlwind we all work in, communication skills are becoming more important, not less. Sending an email does not guarantee that your message has been heard or understood. You need to have two-way conversations with your people. You need to clearly communicate your vision and expectations. But you also need to understand theirs. One of the Do’s in our Embracing Diversity programme is to take a junior member of the team for a coffee. A partner in a global professional services firm said it proved to be the most revealing and useful 15 minutes he had spent in a long time. He had got so far from the coal face he had no idea of some of the things that were happening. Could you do that today?
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Managing change/growth
We are all habit machines. Our brains are wired to save energy by doing the same things. That makes managing change difficult. Jason Ryan at digital agency Brilliant Noise says that the global clients they work with often think that embracing digital is all about technology and almost always overlook the necessity to bring their people with them. If you want to effect change as a leader, you have to focus on change in your people. Think about the people that will have the most impact on a change you want to bring about. Think about what’s in it for them. Create a positive motivation for them. Ask them how they will then drive that change through your organisation.
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Innovation
Google, one of the most innovative companies on the planet, has distilled innovation into 8 pillars that work for them. We love the first two: “Have a mission that matters” and “Think big but start small.” Thinking about your work, can you single out an innovation with a mission that matters to your business? Can you then break it down into small steps you can share with your team? Haven’t got a team? No problem. This is still something you can apply to your job, taking small steps to make changes that will get noticed and make a difference. Be bold. Be brave. Enjoy it.
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Honesty
The best leaders are honest. They are honest with their teams. And honest with themselves. And when things aren’t going well they are brave enough to share that and invite everyone to help work out what needs doing. So what can you do to encourage honesty? One extreme we love is the Church of Fail, where you celebrate failure – with the idea that everyone learns. If you would rather start small, one thing you can do is to seek unbiased input from people outside your normal sphere of operations. Colleagues? Customers? Suppliers? How do other people see the world you are creating and how could it be improved?
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Strategy/Vision into results
Many firms take costly days out and employ expensive consultants to help define strategy and vision. Sadly most of them then return to the pressures of business as usual. What the best leaders do is to constantly check-in against that strategy. Not just on the outcomes. But on how much of their own time and their team’s time is spent working towards what matters. Tony Crabbe in his excellent book ‘Busy’ talks about a shift from managing our time to managing our attention. Take a look at your to do list for tomorrow. Ask yourself what is most important for your goals? What could you forget so you can get on with what really matters?
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Work/Life Balance
Work life balance is not a two-way seesway. It’s more of a roundabout with four quadrants: work, home, community, and self. If you don’t look after any one of these domains, the others will suffer in the long-term. So draw yourself a circle and divide it in four. List one thing in each quadrant you will do this week. Notice which quadrant you feel less committed to – and do that first. Unlikely to talk to that local charity about some of your people volunteering? Set up a meeting. Haven’t got home in time for kids bedtime this week. Diary it. Haven’t got time to spend on something you love? Book it and look forward to it without feeling guilty. You’re a leader. This is what great leaders do.
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Practice
Like any other life skills, practice is key. The much vaunted 10,000-hours practice to become an expert musician or sportsman (attributed to a 1993 paper written by Anders Ericsson, a Professor at the University of Colorado), is hotly debated, but the core idea is difficult to dispute. The more you practice, the more capable you are, the more confident you become, and yes, the luckier you seem to be.
So no matter where you currently sit in the hierarchy of your organisation or your industry, these leadership tools will be invaluable. Practice every day. Learn from good and poor outcomes. And enjoy the journey, as your leadership skills continue to develop.
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