The difference between a true leader and someone who’s just in it for the money and glory is vast. How can you spot a good leader? Or more importantly, what do you need to work on to become a great leader yourself?
Good to Great
by Jim Collins
⏱ 15 minutes reading time
🎧 Audio version available
They Have Superb Communication Skills
A true leader– like the kind you follow past the boardroom and, like, into battle– is one that communicates.
What makes people stand out, even among leadership positions, is their superb communication skills. This is how you not only express your needs, but build empathy and strong relations within your team, eliminating confusion and uncertainty.
Communication can be broken down into several parts, the first, and arguably most important, part is listening. Effective leaders aren’t all talk– they listen too.
They pay attention to what their teams, their followers, their employees, or whoever they’re leading, are saying. Making people feel heard breeds loyalty and satisfaction. Wasn’t it Dale Carnegie who said, in How to Win Friends and Influence People,
“talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours?”
This is why some leaders seem to magnetically draw people to them. They make time to sit down and hear others’ concerns. They make eye contact. They show genuine interest in the lives of their subordinates. The more the leader listens, the more passionate people will be about following them and their cause, the more they’ll trust them, and the more dedicated they’ll be.
Look at it this way: if a person doesn’t make eye contact consistently, this shows they’re not interested. They don’t even bother pretending to care about people beyond their skills, employees will pull away. If you want to be a true leader, one whose followers genuinely want to follow and trust, then communication is an absolutely crucial skill.
And contrary to what many “managers” believe, employees can’t read your mind. Good leaders don’t take pleasure in withholding information.
They’re Visionaries
Steve Jobs once said,
“Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.”
So, it should come as no surprise that a unique leadership quality is the capability to be a visionary.
Jack Welch, who was the chairman and CEO of General Electric for over two decades, and who was known to have a powerful, enviable leadership style that was characterized by a peerless openness to new ideas, openness to change, quality, empowerment of employees, and constantly seeking for a competitive advantage, and who was also known to have received the largest severance payment in business history– which was a staggering $417 million, if you’re curious.
Yeah, that leader, he believed that
“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”
John C. Maxwell, the millionaire author known for writing books about leadership, preaches that “people buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.”
What do all these quotes and testimonies mean? It means that a company is only as good as a leader’s vision for it. Good leaders are constantly motivated, and by extension, motivate others by striving to achieve their visions. They inspire loyalty and enthusiasm. They’re a constant reminder that there’s an amazing “big picture,” that they’re not just clocking in from 9 to 5, and that there is always an opportunity to innovate and outdo yourself.
They’re Not Afraid to Delegate
What else distinguishes a true leader from others? It’s a quality you might not expect. While leaders are expected to be these almighty, all-knowing, talented individuals, one quality that proves they are genuine is their ability to delegate.
They know it’s physically and mentally impossible to do everything on their own– they don’t even want to! Delegation isn’t something they’re irked by. In fact, they encourage it. See, that means they trust in their employees and believe that they will be more than capable of handling the task given to them.
You know what results from that? An instant boost in morale in the workplace. There is nothing like your leader showing their confidence in your abilities that makes you not just loyal to them, but more confident in your skills.
Regardless of the type of business, employees want to feel appreciated and rewarded. By being selected, they feel like their effort is valuable and important.
This is where a lot of leaders go wrong. You could have every one of the other qualities we mentioned– but lacking the ability to delegate? You may just be bumped down from a great leader to just a good one.
Unfortunately, a lot of leaders, especially new ones, want perfection. So, they end up doing all the work themselves. A hallmark of a great leader is trusting their employees.
They trust in another quality to ensure their team is elevated properly! They focus on inspiring others, communicating their common goals, and giving their team the resources and space they need to thrive.
Lastly, the ability to delegate shows something that makes true leaders stand out. Some leaders genuinely want to see others succeed and aren’t threatened by others’ success. Others? They want all the glory for themselves. Obviously, true leaders fall into the former category.
They’re Responsible
Leadership isn’t all rainbows, sunshine, and glory. There are some ugly, albeit necessary, parts too, and among those less savoury bits is experiencing failure. A truly powerful leadership quality is the crucial ability to take responsibility.
When something goes wrong, they don’t seek the nearest scapegoat. They insist on personal accountability for failure, setting the example in the workplace that it’s okay to fail, and it’s far more important to not shift the blame.
Following that, you won’t often find them making excuses. After taking the blame, they don’t spend days wallowing. They trace back the root of the problem and then try to fix it as soon as they can. This is why being about to take responsibility is such a key leadership quality. It extends beyond owning up to things. It’s about being able to solve problems better. About setting an inspiring, powerful example.
Famous U.S. businessman Arnold Glasow famously said,
“A good leader takes little more than his share of the blame and little less than his share of the credit.”
By extension, that means that good leaders don’t just take responsibility for their own performance, but for everyone else’s too. Both the good and the bad. This ends up creating an unparalleled sense of community and responsibility among the team where giving credit where credit is due is the norm.
They Have Emotional Intelligence
The Harvard Business Review sees emotional intelligence as
“a ground-breaking, paradigm-shattering idea that is one of the most influential business ideas of the decade.”
So that rounds up to the last strong leadership quality that defines a true leader: having emotional intelligence. What does that entail? It’s beyond being aware of and understanding other people’s feelings.
For one thing, being a true leader is an empathic one. Being empathic forges a powerful, deeply personal connection with those you are leading.
So, it’s not just about being a nice person. It’s about having conversations with your followers to understand their motivations, their problems, their dreams, and what matters to them.
You may ask what the benefits are to this other than having good relationships with your followers? As an empathic leader, you’re able to increase morale in the workplace; you’re able to improve on your work strategies; you’re able to make better predictions; and finally, you’re able to inspire flawless loyalty in your team.
Believe it or not, but the relevance of emotional intelligence to leadership is a fairly new idea. It wasn’t popularized until 1995, when author and journalist Daniel Goleman came out with a ground-breaking book called “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ.”
In this book, he discusses how emotional intelligence is responsible for 67% of the qualities necessary for a powerful leadership performance. No matter how smart you are, you’re not going to get far without it. Now you understand where people are coming from– their dreams, problems, etc., you’re able to create an environment where your team is more productive and where leaders thrive.
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