Some people sit and pontificate about whether leaders are made or born. The true leader ignores such arguments and instead concentrates on how to become a better. In this article we are going to discuss five leadership traits that people look for in a leader. If you are able to increase your skill in these five traits you will make it easier for people to want to follow you. The less time you have to spend on getting people to follow you, the more time you have to spend refining exactly where you want to go and how to get there.
The five leadership traits are:
- Honest
- Forward-Looking
Many people get put in a leadership position and just lead by accident. They do whatever seems good at the time without viewing each action as part of an overall plan. Sometimes they do great things and sometimes they do things that really hurt them from a leadership standpoint. Leading on purpose means making decisions as part of an overall strategy to make it easier for people to follow you.
Examine Each Action From a Leadership Perspective
Whenever you get ready to do something, ask yourself if it will help or hurt your leadership influence. For example, the evening you are asking everyone else to stay and work late, probably isn't a good time to announce that you are head off to see a movie.
This is an interview with three coaches that specialize in leadership. They generously offered to answer some questions about leadership and leadership coaching for Leadership501. The coaches are:
Read on for their insights into leadership.
Writing is an important leadership skill that is often overlooked. It is unlikely that you will ever see writing at the top of any list of important leadership skills. For a leader to be effective they must communicate their outlook, vision and worldview to the people they are leading. A leader who cannot communicate well using written words is going to be severely handicapped.
Another reason leaders need to write is to help them develop and clarify their ideas. Much of what makes someone a good leader is his or her viewpoint and perspective. Someone who makes good decisions usually does so because of how they look at problems. Someone who instinctively does the right thing will often have a difficult time explaining their decision making process to others.
This is a collection of tips for new supervisors. The advice is useful to anyone in a management position. Most people are thrown into supervisory positions with very little in the way of training or guidance. These tips for supervisors can help you be proactive in avoiding problems that can occur further down the road.
- Know the Rules – In order to be an effective supervisor, you need to be aware of your organization's policies and procedures. If you don't, you'll likely make promises you can't keep or deal with situations inappropriately simply because you don't understand the correct procedure. The procedures and policies are there to help you make good decisions even when you are under pressure or time-constraints.
Leadership trait theory is the idea that people are born with certain character traits. Since certain traits are associated with proficient leadership, it assumes that if you could identify people with the correct traits you will be able to identify leaders.
Most of the time the traits are considered to be naturally part of a person's personality from birth. From this standpoint leadership trait theory tends to assume the people are born as leaders or not as leaders.
There is a lot of value in identifying the character traits associated with leadership. It is even more valuable to identify the character traits that followers look for in a leader. These traits would be the characteristics of an individual who is most likely to attract followers.
If you lookup the dictionary definition of management, among many examples you will find clues as to the real definition of management. This article simply takes an assortment of definitions and looks at what they say and what they imply about management.
Functional leadership is an approach that concentrates on how leadership occurs rather than focusing on who does the leading. It defines the types of leadership behaviors that guide an organization and then looks at how those behaviors occur. Under this type of model, leadership is a distributed function. People at all levels can participate in guiding the organization. One of the cornerstones of this leadership model is its focus on HOW instead of WHO.
This approach has some tremendous advantages when studying leadership. The models that focus on WHO leads tend to look at the person with formal authority in an organization. In many situations, the person with formal authority is not the real leader. Sometimes there is no single "real" leader. Even an organization that appears to be floundering with no leadership is being led. People are still making decisions and forming opinions.
The last 20 years has seen an incredible increase in technology. Most of the principles of good leadership remain the same regardless of how technology changes. However technology presents new challenges for leaders.
Virtual Contact Leadership
One of the benefits of modern technology is the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. While this is a benefit for businesses looking to expand, it presents unique challenges for leaders. Many leaders have a leadership skill set that relies heavily on their personality and "presence". Many of these skill don't translate well into electronic communication.
As a leader you need to cultivate your teams confidence. Your team should have confidence in themselves as well as confidence in your leadership skills. The best way to create confidence is through a series of victories. In general people will judge the probability of future success based on past performance. As you work with your team you will build a history. If you maintain a good track record of success you will create a sense of optimism that future proposed projects will also be successful. If you have a record of failure, your team will probably view any new projects as having a high chance of failing.