Building a solid and effective team takes significant effort. Good leaders make or break quality team performance. It is crucial to select people with the best traits and understand healthy company cultures, improved retention, and how to achieve high engagement levels.
Whether you choose leaders from within (which is good because it demonstrates investment in and loyalty to your employees) or outside, decide with effective leadership qualities in mind.
Qualities of Effective Leaders
You can teach skills, but internal traits are often innate in the people entering leadership. When hiring, it's best to prioritize candidates based on these traits and match them to the culture you want to develop and your organization's needs.
Choosing leaders who demonstrate these nine traits can help your team and company thrive:
1. Emotional Stability & Intelligence
Everyone's heard of the boss who can't control their emotions. Not only does a yelling, angry supervisor affect the morale of the target, but it affects everyone. Emotional stability and intelligence are vital for anyone in a leadership position, as it helps them make rational decisions during stressful times and manage their team with patience.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your and others' emotions. A leader with high emotional intelligence can control their reactions, avoid confrontation, and intuitively interpret others' feelings, reducing conflict between team members. It also helps them constructively deliver feedback by adjusting how you frame your message in the most receptive way possible.
2. Kindness & Friendliness
While getting too close to your team members can be bad, good leaders show kindness and friendliness to their subordinates. They keep their door open, they don't only talk about work (and most especially the bad parts), and they provide praise as needed.
Being "best friends" with a subordinate isn't recommended, but people generally work better for those they like. Treating your team to an occasional party or gift goes a long way and can help bring the team together.
3. Thoughtfulness & Empathy
When somebody is going through a tough spot, good leaders react with thoughtfulness and empathy. They will readily adjust workloads as needed to reduce stress (which can lead to mistakes).
Showing empathy for an employee's personal issues while not prying into them helps people get through those issues better. It improves productivity and morale and helps others know they can come to their supervisor with problems and not get an adverse reaction.
4. Integrity
Leaders need to show strong personal integrity. They need to uphold a strong personal standard, act responsibly, hold themselves accountable, and manage situations where they may have made a mistake or fallen short of their efforts. Owning your mistakes should be a first response to clients or team members, followed by working to resolve the issue and creating an action plan to keep it from re-occurring.
There should also never be even a hint of anything "improper," such as showing favoritism and pressuring people to do anything unrelated to work. You can instill some of that with training, but they need the fundamental willingness to go along with and support diversity and inclusion efforts.
5. Creativity
Ideas are cheap, as they say, but some people are better at coming up with them than others and finding creative solutions to your company's problems. Good leaders must be able to find these solutions.
They also need to respect and acknowledge others' creativity and accept ideas from team members. They need the imagination to see what will work and develop solutions that will work outside the norm but with the risk assessment to make informed decisions.
6. Ability to Communicate
You can teach communication skills. However, your new leader needs to have an innate ability and comfort with extensive communication. That's not to say they need to be extroverts, but they need to understand they should keep their door open. They need to see how communication, in all directions, strengthens a team. We have all had the boss who dictates orders and then closes their office door, which is not what you want.
Problem-solving is the overwhelming majority of a leadership role, and being able to communicate and develop a system of communication is crucial. It can let you show the necessary empathy to clients and employees while helping to resolve the issue. Knowing how to ask questions helps you gain insight to either anticipate and prevent or quickly resolve core problems, gaining trust.
7. Self-Awareness
In this context, that means the ability to acknowledge and accept one's own mistakes and hold oneself accountable instead of blaming others, which ties into their sense of integrity. Nobody is perfect, and even the best leader will make mistakes. Your leaders should know where the buck stops and be able to determine when the mistake is on them, deal with it appropriately, and learn from it, so it does not happen again.
They also must recognize how they act and their immediate effect on the team. Emotional intelligence helps leaders understand how others feel, and self-awareness means adding themselves into the equation. Self-aware people can relate to others more quickly because they know what they're going through and can approach sensitive topics in a way that's kind to everyone.
8. Engagement
Leaders must have a good work ethic and passion for what they do without being workaholics. They should set a good example for their team by showing passion and keeping balance and boundaries. An apathetic leader will lead an apathetic team, which increases turnover as people look for jobs where people care.
In caring themselves, they create an engaged team who looks out for the company's best interests. They will likely be more productive and make better quality work because they invest in the company's reputation. Engagement is something led by example, and having leaders engaged with the company gives employees a positive example to follow.
9. Strong Ethical Sensibility
While somewhat related to integrity, ethical sensibility refers to recognizing and understanding the ethics around a situation to determine the proper course of action. Integrity, meanwhile, involves standing for your morals and ethics. A strong ethical sensible allows a leader to guide others and instill integrity into the entire team, so they work together well and with fewer conflicts.
Invest in Leaders to Grow Your Business
Leadership holds your company together and helps it reach its full potential. As your company grows, it's essential to select and nurture new and future leaders so that you can expand and thrive. As you grow your business, consider what changing needs will help your business grow, then think through which leadership qualities will help you fulfill that. As you expand your leadership team, create a set of training guidelines to help new managers understand your organization and help reach your ongoing goals.
