Any company relies on leadership, and good leaders can mean the difference between success and failure. So, what are the traits of a good leader? While some may claim that leadership is a natural trait, others feel that it can be developed through deliberate work and practice.
No matter what you think, one thing’s clear – if you want to be in charge and make a difference in your life, you have to have those good leadership qualities. So, let’s get started and look at 8 key traits that make successful leaders.
LEARN ABOUT: Leadership Assessment Tools
What is a good leader?
A good leader is someone who has a set of traits and abilities that enable them to effectively guide, inspire, and encourage people toward a common objective.
A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way – John C Maxwell.
There are a number of definitions for “good leaders,” let alone what a great leader is. Greatness has nothing to do with the trait of a person because the measure of successful leaders has less to do with how you define their role and more about how they influence the people around them.
Every person you meet will define leadership qualities in the manner they understand them. Irrespective of how you define a leader, he or she should be someone who knows to differentiate between good and bad.
Good leaders have a futuristic vision and know how to turn ideas into reality. They can motivate their team members to strive for excellence and achieve their common goals. Finally, a good leader is committed to their team’s success and prepared to put in the effort required to achieve it.
Why is Effective Leadership Important in Businesses?
Effective leadership is important for getting ahead and can really help out individuals, teams, and organizations. Here are some of the key benefits of successful leadership skills:
Improved employee engagement
Influential leaders create a pleasant work atmosphere that promotes collaboration, communication, and creativity, which can boost employee engagement and job satisfaction.
Better decision-making
Effective leaders are able to gather and analyze information, consider different choices, and make smart decisions that help the whole organization.
Improved customer satisfaction
Effective leaders may foster a customer-focused culture that prioritizes customers’ demands and preferences, which can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Increased productivity and profitability
Effective leaders can excite and inspire their teams to strive toward common goals, which can lead to increased productivity and better business outcomes. They can increase revenue and profitability by improving efficiency, decision-making, and customer satisfaction.
Improved innovation
Good leaders support their team members’ creativity and invention, which can lead to the development of fresh products, services, and processes that boost the organization’s competitiveness.
That’s why it’s important to have good leadership skills. To keep your employees happy, satisfy your customers, and boost your company’s productivity, you must have effective leaders who can talk, lead teams, and make things happen.
How to Identify Leadership Traits?
Identifying leadership traits refers to monitoring and assessing certain characteristics and actions associated with good leadership skills. Here are some steps you can take to identify leadership qualities:
Conduct assessments
Personality evaluation, 360-degree feedback, and leadership surveys are some of the assessments that can be used to identify essential leadership qualities. These techniques can provide useful insights into a leader’s strengths and limitations and assist in identifying areas for improvement.
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Solicit feedback
Getting feedback from others is another technique to uncover traits of leadership. This can include collecting feedback from team members, coworkers, and supervisors on a certain leader’s strengths and weaknesses.
Look for patterns
It’s critical to search for trends that emerge over time to identify leadership attributes. This can entail researching a leader’s behavior and actions over weeks, months, or even years to identify regular behavior patterns.
Observe leaders in action
Observing leaders in action is one technique to detect essential leadership qualities. This can include observing how they interact with others, make decisions, and deal with challenges and disappointments.
Top 8 Traits of a Good Leader
According to a study conducted by Forbes, company leadership is in crisis. Nearly one-third of employees find it difficult to trust their management. Management, in addition, has to cater to the needs of the millennials.
On average, Millenial changes his/her job at least four times from the day they leave college until they turn 32. The reason is most of them don’t feel empowered in their current jobs.
Clearly, most leaders fail to develop a sense of loyalty and trust in their employees. But that doesn’t have to be the case! Managers who exhibit great leadership qualities inspire their team to achieve above and beyond the required. Train your managers to be true leaders and not just bosses.
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In this section, you will learn about the 8 traits leaders must exhibit to stand out:
Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm is not just for motivating people but also for a business, its products, and its mission; enthusiasm cannot be faked. Employees are very intelligent; they understand when there is fake cheerleading and when the leaders are sincere with their enthusiasm. Sincere enthusiasm is contagious.
Honesty and Integrity
Doing the right thing even when no one is watching is integrity. Be honest with your employees, whether it is giving proper credit or feedback. Great leaders exhibit integrity and honesty at all times.
They do what is right, even if they have to make certain sacrifices for it. When employees see leaders lacking integrity, they might never be able to trust them again.
Excellent communication skills
Good leaders must inspire. Inspiration works stronger than motivation; it helps bring in discipline and encourages people to own up to their responsibilities. All this cannot be done if the leader lacks communication skills.
Poor communication skills can lead to poor output. Leaders who cannot develop excellent communication skills usually fail to conceptualize their ideas. It is also important to remember listening is an integral part of communicating.
Transparency
If you are a customer-facing organization, there might be chances that your employees might get frustrated with certain customers. Good leaders have the uncanny ability not to let rumors spread. They are open and transparent and embrace solutions and not problems.
Instead of firing employees, a true leader will help the employee channel his/her energy to come up with a solution to deal with the customer. Transparency is the key!
Emotional Intelligence
Leadership should be duplicable. A good leader is one who has his/her on their shoulder and can think rationally, especially in a crisis situation.
Good leaders improve their emotional intelligence by a conscious effort to understand the reason why people behave the way they do. They always trust facts and figures more than mere rumors. When you understand this, it is always easier to respond with dignity.
Passion
If you need to excel at anything, you need to be passionate about it. If strong leaders don’t convey passion, then there will be no passion within the organization.
Employee engagement is the secret ingredient for the success recipe of any organization. When engagement levels are dwindling, an organization has difficulty hitting its bottom line. When you see that in your employees, you have to show them that passion and lift their spirits!
Empathy
Empathy changes you as a human being. It helps you learn the importance of another human being. An organization is a place where many human beings closely interact with each other. They are dependent on each other for various work-related activities and communication. They need each other to help in making a concept come to reality.
A leader has to oversee all the humans in the organization. If there is a lack of empathy, there is a serious lack of understanding, and that is bad for your business.
Open-minded
Leaders need to be open-minded; they cannot show or discriminate against anyone who works with them or for you. A good leader leads by example.
Similarly, there will be instances when people would want to give you feedback regarding what is going well in the organization and what is not working all that well. You must keep an open mind to accept the feedback and positively make informed decisions.
Finally, a good leader has all the above-mentioned traits, but if you seem to lack some of these traits, you might struggle to make your mark as an influential leader.
Set a good example for those who look up to you, trust you, and put their most valuable assets in your hands. Communicate fairly, commit to only what you can deliver, take decisions that will not harm any individual, and stand up for everything that is true. Then you become a successful leader!
How Can QuestionPro Workforce Help Develop the Traits of a Good Leader?
QuestionPro Workforce can be a useful tool to develop the traits of a good leader. It includes tools for evaluating leadership skills, such as 360-degree feedback surveys and self-awareness assessments. Here are some key building blocks that help turn 360-degree feedback into actions and results.
Survey Setup
The platform’s flexible, easy-to-set-up surveys and customizable processes make getting feedback from anyone inside or outside the company easy.
Respondent Portal
Its streamlined, automated evaluation method makes it easy to keep track of who answered surveys, add new participants, and send automatic reminders to raters.
Custom Branded
You can make your brand obvious throughout the whole process, from the design of the survey to the portal, email templates, and reports.
Dynamic Reporting
Its unique, customizable, and easy-to-understand reports make it easy for your leaders to see where they are doing well and where they need to improve, which motivates them to take action.
Managing Deployments
You can easily keep track of different deployments and set up different rights for each person who needs to access the system.
QuestionPro Workforce offers analytics and reporting solutions to assist leaders in tracking performance metrics, identifying trends, and making data-driven choices. These insights can assist leaders in identifying areas for improvement, measuring the impact of leadership initiatives, and driving continuous progress.
The Leadership Assessment Survey template can be used to aid in the growth of leadership qualities by offering honest feedback on one’s performance in a leadership role. The results of these evaluations can shed light on a leader’s strengths and weaknesses and the steps that need to be taken to improve their leadership qualities.
We’d love to contact you if you’d want to learn more about human resources surveys or get more of these fascinating insights. Contact us to learn how to construct your first leadership survey if you want to get started right now.
