What are the characteristics of a Leader?
Characteristics of a Leader
Or all bosses have the characteristics of a leader. To be a good leader requires a series of qualities and characteristics, but above all a lot of effort.
What are the characteristics of a good leader? Here are some characteristics on leadership collected in the Building Future Leadership Congress.
- Desire for change
- Commitment
- Initiative
- Losing the fear
- Understanding your environment
- Ego and modesty
- Be optimistic
- Effort
- Creativity
- Aims and Objectives
10 characteristics of a leader
1. Desire for change:
"Leaders have a deep desire to wake up each day with a different view of the world and believe they can bring about change. From then on, they start to move," says Dana Weis, an Israeli journalist.
The good leader corrects his course continuously and is not afraid to face changes because he is able to adapt constantly to new circumstances.
2. Commitment:
Aharon Horwitz, director of Presen Tense Group, believes that "if you want to be a leader you have to commit yourself and get people to commit to your project". The most important thing is to get your first follower.
It takes charisma and good communication skills. Therefore, a common mistake in leadership is to ignore the personal and family situation of an employee, which can affect their job performance.
Knowing the particular circumstances of workers means having improved decision-making capacity. Hence, it is also becoming more and more common for good leaders to be interested in the diversity of the team's cultures or nationalities.
3. Initiative
This quality is essential to being a good leader. Pulling the cart and proposing different things make all the difference.
Do it and let others realize it's been done, too. The leader assumes and listens to the demands of his team.
It develops the ability to allocate an emotional salary based not only on economic benefit, but also on watching over the working conditions of its employees.
4. Losing the fear:
The personal training specialist, Ariel Halevi, says that the barrier of fear of failure must be broken because "before achieving success one has to make all the necessary mistakes from which one can learn".
However, the good leader knows that his success is also determined by the transversal activity of the company and it is enough that one is weak, so that the work does not go ahead.
That is why the good leader must relate to all departments and take into account all the processes and personnel involved.
5. Understand your environment:
Shájar Shimron, an expert in coaching, says that a leader must know how to discover the capabilities of each member of the team, understand that "all human beings are different" and show sensitivity to them.
Empathizing is therefore an indispensable quality for the leader, who must not only maintain sobriety and be modest in his ostentation. Not because they hang a shiny sign on an office, you need to brag about it or forget that at some point you also started from below and you were upset by certain attitudes.
6. Ego and modesty:
Ariel Halevi, CEO of Debate, says that "ego is what moves people to step forward" and clarifies that "a leader has to know how to manage his ego and be modest". Modesty and ego are two qualities of a good leader that do not conflict.
A common mistake of bad bosses is to show little accessibility to give themselves importance and feed their ego. Dedicate time to the demands of your employees and know first hand what they want to tell you, is the best formula to control the work of your team. You must always find the time to listen to them.
Modesty and ego are two qualities of a good leader that do not conflict. Click to tweet
7. Be optimistic:
The majority of experts at the Congress stress that being optimistic is one of the characteristics of a good leader and entrepreneurs and a great support to achieve success. that motivation and ability to think that "everything is going to go well" is transferred with the same good energy to the entire team.
8. Effort:
One has to be passionate enough to go ahead and devote a lot of effort to the project. Manage adversity with a head and not be carried away by pessimism.
The effort must be above everything else, and this includes an exhaustive personal organization: learning to prioritize and prioritize what is important, rather than what is urgent. Optimizing the work methodology is a great idea when it comes to favoring efficiency.
9. Creativity:
It is important to be creative, but this quality must be handled with care. It's dangerous to be very creative if it leads you to lose focus on what you want to achieve. in an increasingly competitive environment, speed is paramount.
That's why sometimes the competitive advantage lies in being able to improvise and re-invent ourselves constantly.
10. Objectives
Every good leader must set himself a series of challenges in his path and establish a deadline to reach them.
A good leader must pull the cart and propose different things that make a difference. Click to tweet
Being a leader not only implies having certain power over the rest of the workers or having certain characteristics, but also being observed and analysed by the same subordinates.
The leader should serve as an example to follow, since people will notice what he does and what he says.
Leading by Example, by John Adair
Becoming an example in a conscious way to influence others seems to be more of a manipulative exercise, which is why John Adair, a world leader in leadership, talks about "setting an example and not becoming an example".
He adds, "You can give example unconsciously, as an expression of who you are, and that's very different from doing something because a certain effect is carefully calculated.
If the example becomes a habit, you will stop thinking about it and congratulate yourself much less for being such a great leader.
This guru synthesizes his ideas in these six points on leadership:
- The six most important words: Acknowledge that I made a mistake.
- The five most important words: I'm so proud of you.
- The four most important words: What is your opinion?
- The three most important words: If you like.
- The two most important words: Thank you very much.
- The most important word: us.
- And the last word and the least important: Me.
The importance of a good leader
The business world is at a time of great change and everything augurs that it will continue to do so, at least for the time being.
Globalization, the continuous advances in technological tools, as well as the global economic uncertainty has caused that the different teams and departments of the companies are subject to continuous variations.
These changes can directly affect the future of the company, affecting its benefits and therefore its employees.
That is why the figure of the leader is gaining a fundamental importance today. However, there are many who still confuse what the qualities of a good leader should be.
A leader is...
...capable of uniting a team of work
...to join forces to achieve common goals.
...a person who puts his team's interests ahead of his own.
...and with a superior capacity for motivation.
These changes have caught many old managers by surprise, who have not been able to adapt their strategies to the new times, so it is not so easy today to find a true leader.
Leadership Example
However, we want to show you a clear example of motivational leadership. Emmanuel Faber, Director General of Danone, delivered an emotional speech in which he appealed for social justice and denounced the three major problems that today's young people will face: power, money and glory.
With these words the director wanted to open the eyes of those young people who were concentrating to listen to him.
To confuse leadership with rank, privilege or money are recurrent errors that appeal to a false conception of the term. Precisely Carlos Hernández and Rafael Martínez-Vilanova collect the most recurrent errors in this regard in their book Los 100 errores en el liderazgo.
Gathering the 10 characteristics of a leader mentioned above, knowing how to preach by example to your workers or team in a natural way, can turn you into something more than a boss and become a guide or referent of the work teams.
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