The 7 Most Important Abilities of a Leader
To be a leader, one must have followers. To get and keep followers, these seven abilities float to the top of the list of hundreds that a leader needs to demonstrate to be effective.
Creating a Vision
A leader is different from a manager. I think Stephen Covey put it best in his 7 Habits for Highly Effective People, when he described the difference between managers and leaders in a jungle-clearing operation. Managers are the ones driving efficiency, measuring performance, and training the team members, whereas the leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, looks around and then yells out ‘WRONG FORREST!’
To paraphrase Peter Drucker, management is concerned with doing things right, whereas leadership is about doing the right things! Getting the team aligned to do the right things requires a leader to be able to establish a compelling vision for the team, and connecting every team member emotionally to that vision.
Without a sound and motivating vision, the team will be dysfunctional, as every individual will simply follow their own view and these different views will often contradict one another.
Just how the leader goes about creating that vision, relies on many leadership qualities, including the ability to engage empathetically, analyze information, and understand their business.
Building Trust
Trust is a critical element of any high-performing team, and the leader must instill and build it. Using an empathic leadership style and being consistent in one’s approach, language, and actions, will build confidence that team members know how a leader will react to a given set of circumstances. This confidence empowers the team members to act quickly, without first seeking permission. Being empowered strengthens engagement. Higher engagement levels, by definition, will result in higher effort. If the vision is clear and the team is ‘bought-in’ to that vision, higher effort must result in more activity in support of the vision. Therefore, the ability of a leader in building organizational trust is paramount.
Communicating Effectively
One of the best tools to build trust and drive towards the vision, is to have strong and consistent messaging that reaches all members of the team, and allows for feedback, questioning, and answering the deeper ‘why’s’ behind the topics. It is important to note that different people will optimally receive and digest information differently, and therefore a leader needs to utilize enough different communication platforms and methods to ensure that they reach all team members.
In my own leadership experience, I’ve found that communication in a large team or operation, is often very incomplete. This is because leaders focus on only one channel of communication, and often it is only one-directional and infrequent! Email, bulletin boards, town-hall meetings, informal walk-abouts, employee chat sessions, and informational videos, are all just examples of different channels that can be leveraged to reach different employees.
The communication also needs to be two-way. Leaders MUST listen to their team members and again, gathering this feedback may require multiple channels of communication. Feedback is the only way to know for sure if the messaging is getting through!
Fostering Collaboration
The ability to effectively collaborate and promote collaborative behavior in others could perhaps be considered a sub-category to communication, but is so important, that it deserves a special call-out on this list. Creating a collaborative environment means defining and demonstrating the key behaviors and language that are to be the norm of the teams. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity. An empathetic culture will help to encourage effective collaboration.
As teams have become more diverse in communication patterns, thought processes, experiences, and cultures (the more diverse the better!), the challenge for the leader to promote effective collaboration has become more difficult. The leader must recognize the value in different approaches and coach team members effectively to reduce friction amongst team members that is inevitable to occur when people approach problems with different points of view and communicate in very different ways. To do so effectively, leaders must be self-aware of their own unconscious biases.
Taking an Action Orientation
The bottom line of course is that we can communicate all day long, but if we do not act, we will not accomplish anything. A leader must have a disposition towards action. Certainly, risks need to be evaluated and mitigations taken, but act we must. The ability of a leader to know when action is worth the risk, and their willingness to accept the risk and act, is therefore critical.
Recognizing the Team
By highlighting and calling out actions and behaviors that are in line with achieving milestones toward the vision, the leader will cultivate more of the same behavior. To be effective, the leader must recognize in a timely manner, frequently, and most importantly, sincerely. Insincere flattery will have the opposite effect on team performance! The importance of recognizing employees is in supporting a highly engaged team.
Ensuring Accountability
Being a role model is critical for the leader to encourage more of the behaviors and actions needed to progress towards the vision, and keep the team culture on track. When a failure occurs, it is important to demonstrate accountability - we own our behavior and attitude - and the results of those behaviors and attitudes. Likewise, as the leader, we must hold our team members accountable to meeting the standards. This always starts with clearly communicating the vision, goals, and expectations.
