Qualities of successful leaders

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Qualities of successful leaders

Contents

Leadership is about doing--but it's also about being. Notes here consider some of the qualities that make for successful leaders.

Note: Portions of this article that appear to relate more to management than to leadership as such have been moved to Qualities of successful managers. Those portions include In search of growth leaders and You need both passion and compassion to lead.

Key points

A few of the key points from these discussions:

  • Leaders inspire others by being enthusiastic, consistent, optimistic and encouraging--and by telling memorable stories.
  • The leaders of "21st-century organizations" must be flexible, humble, adaptable and resilient--and resilience becomes more important in difficult times.
  • Good leaders must be effective negotiators, which involves appealing to others' interests, communicating with them effectively and selling your vision.
  • You can become a more effective leader by developing a genuine interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need.
  • Leadership is about having the self-confidence to do what is right even when it is not popular.
  • Leaders need to know their stuff, be a mensch and look after their team--and they also need to be able to persuade others, which starts with listening.
  • Great leaders are authentic, knowing their own strengths, weaknesses, values and motivations.
  • Trusted leaders stick with long-term goals, are committed to ongoing communication, actively reach out, are visible and accessible and inspire others with their long-term visions.
  • Leadership entails risk.
  • Leaders are frequently incomplete, and that may be realistic--but good leaders will understand their incompleteness and work with others to fill in the pieces.
  • The best leaders take courageous action, making intelligent gambles and aiming for the right timing.
  • Leaders pay attention, form a vision, build trust and leave their egos at the door.

Seven secrets of inspiring leaders

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest June 2009'

As a leader, you are in the motivation business, selling your vision, your values, and yourself. Communications coach and BusinessWeek columnist Carmine Gallo talks about how successful leaders inspire others.

  1. Demonstrate enthusiasm constantly. “You cannot inspire unless you’re inspired yourself. “
  2. Articulate a consistent vision. In ten years Coldstone Creamery’s vision of the ice cream experience inspired growth to 1,000 stores. A goal to double sales is not inspiring. Neither is a long, convoluted mission statement. “A vision is a short (usually ten words or less), vivid description of what the world will look like if your product or service succeeds.” Microsoft’s Bill Gates’ vision was to put a computer on every desk, in every home.
  3. Sell the benefit. Inspiring leaders constantly sell the benefit, not the technology, of a product or service. People ask “What’s in it for me?” Answer that question. How will your product or service improve customers’ lives?
  4. Tell more stories. Inspiring leaders tell memorable stories. The Ritz Carlton uses WOW stories—stories about staff members’ extraordinary service—at brief meetings. In a service environment the goal is to create an emotional engagement with the brand. That connection can be achieved only with people, not things.
  5. Invite participation. Then listen to the input and actively incorporate what you hear. Younger employees want meaningul work and expect feedback.
  6. Reinforce an optimistic outlook. The opposite of a leader isn’t a follower; it’s a pessimist. Be a beacon of hope.
  7. Encourage potential. Inspiring leaders encourage people’s potential by emotionally investing in them. Younger workers are looking for leaders they can believe in. Show them you care.

By inspiring those around you, you become the kind of person people want to be around.

(Carmine Gallo, “The seven secrets of inspiring leaders,” BusinessWeek video and article.)

Becoming resilient in times of adversity

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest April 2009

In today’s climate of economic adversity, resiliency is more important than ever. Resilient people are flexible, optimistic, and open to learning. This is a skill set that can be developed, according to Mary Lynn Pulley and Michael Wakefield, authors of Building Resiliency: How to Thrive in Times of Change. Steps you can take include the following:

  • Accept change. You develop resilience when you become more comfortable with change. You can become more accepting of change if you understand what’s happening and where you fit in.
  • Focus on learning. Try new approaches and be open to new skills. This requires willingness to put the long-term value of learning new things ahead of short-term benefits.
  • Find your sense of purpose. A clear sense of purpose can help you to develop a broader perspective.
  • Pay attention to self-identity. You need an identity outside your job. Consider changes you could make at work that could let you do more of the things you want to do outside of work.
  • Reframe your skill set. Cast your skills in a new light to reveal how they might shift into new patterns that could help you adapt to a new job or career.

Hardships can offer valuable life lessons that cannot be learned another way. “Through experiences such as career setbacks, job losses, and leading through tough times, you may discover your ability to endure and bounce back.”

(Center for Creative Leadership, “Effort and attitude: becoming resilient in times of adversity”, Leading Effectively e-Newsletter, March 2009.)

Warren Bennis on leadership

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest February 2009

The Economist calls University of Southern California professor Warren Bennis the leading “thinker on leadership in recent years.” Bennis believes that successful leaders ”follow an almost universal principle of management…as true for orchestra conductors, army generals, football coaches, and school superintendents as for corporate executives.”

When they come to head an organization, successful leaders pay attention to what’s going on, determine what’s “important for the future of the organization, set a new direction” and focus everyone’s attention on it.

Leaders need to be able to: form a vision that gives people “a bridge to the future”; give “meaning to that vision through communication”; build trust; and search for self-knowledge and self-regard.

Good leaders have developed as individuals and are not “afraid of being seen as vulnerable.” They must leave their egos at the door and recognize the skills and traits needed “to build a world-class organisation.” Many successful leaders “give expression to their feminine side.”

Leaders also have a different attitude toward failure than “run-of-the-mill managers, thinking of it not so much as the end of a phase, but rather the beginning of one imbued with knowledge gained from the failure.”

(The Economist: "Leadership," Feb. 2, 2009 and "Warren Bennis," Jul. 25, 2008.)

21st-century leadership for 21st-century organizations

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest November 2008

Since the November 4, 2008 election of Barack Obama as our next President, there’s been a spate of articles in the business literature about his leadership as a model for the future. I’ve summarized a few of my favorites here, focusing on general applicability for leaders of 21st century organizations.

What’s needed for new kinds of institutions like Google and Threadless? Twenty-first century organizations need to be spherical (with a tight center surrounded by “self-organizing cells”) and resilient to turbulence. They need to focus on their greater purposes and unify their markets. Yesterday, we had huge corporations doing tiny, incremental things; “tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.” The next-generation markets will ”need not a hundred different kinds of razors--and their spiralling costs of complexity and waste--but a single razor that everybody can use…” (What does this tell us about libraries and their separate collections accessed through separate Web sites?)

The 21st-century organization will be edge-based—where “everyone has situational awareness, skills to take action, shared values, and decision rights to empower the edge to take action.” Edge-based organizations are more nimble and more effective.

The leaders of these 21st-century organizations must have “qualities of flexibility, humility, adaptability, resilience” and the ability to cope with the unknown.

(Umair Haque, "Obama’s seven lessons for radical innovators," Nov. 5, 2008; John Sviokla, "Barack Obama’s edge-based organization," Nov. 11, 2008; Gill Corkendale, "The world’s first 21st century leader," Nov. 7, 2008, Harvard Business Blogs.)

Editor's note: What does the assertion that we all need the same razor tell us about libraries' many separate collections, which presumably relate to the specific needs and characteristics of their individual communities? To my mind, little or nothing, even if we accept this repudiation of the trend toward mass customization or the notion that "unified markets" with single worldwide products will serve us well in a time when ecological considerations and real-world economics surely argue for more localization.

Real leaders negotiate

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest October 2008

Good leaders must be effective negotiators. You may find yourself leading people who smarter or more powerful than you; often you’ll have to lead people you have no authority over — commissioners, board members, or managers of other departments within your organization.

To negotiate effectively, you need to “appeal to [others'] interests, communicate with them effectively, and sell your vision.” Here’s how:

  1. Practice interest-based leadership. People will follow your lead when they believe “it’s in their best interest … [E]ffective leaders seek to understand and satisfy the interests of those they lead.”
  2. Find the right leadership voice. Walt Whitman wrote, “Surely, whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow.”
  3. Negotiate a vision for the organization. Setting your organization’s course requires “forging a single vision” from the many visions held by the members of your organization.

(Jeswald W. Salacuse, “Real leaders negotiate,” Harvard Business Publishing, reprinted from Harvard Management Update, June 2007.)

Social intelligence and leadership

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest September 2008

Daniel Goleman, who wrote Emotional Intelligence and articles on EI and leadership, and co-author Richard Boyatzis, discuss discoveries revealing that “that certain things leaders do—specifically, exhibit empathy and become attuned to others’ moods—literally affect both their own brain chemistry and that of their followers.” In fact, the leader-follower dynamic is actually a case of two minds becoming “fused” into one.

These discoveries led the authors to develop a “more relationship-based construct for assessing leadership”: social intelligence, which is “interpersonal competencies built on specific neural circuits … that inspire others to be effective.”

What does this mean for you? You can become a better, more effective leader by “developing a genuine interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need.”

Do women have stronger social circuits? While “gender differences in social intelligence” may appear generally among leaders, they’re not found “between the most effective men and the most effective women... Gender, clearly, is not neural destiny.”

Followers mirror their leaders. Behavioral neuroscience has identified “mirror neurons” in the brain that mimic another’s actions. These brain cells allow “us to navigate our social world.” This is important in organizations because “leaders’ emotions and actions prompt followers to mirror those feelings and deeds.”

What’s a “finely attuned” leader? Certain cells in our brains help us tell instantly how we feel about a person and let us gauge if he or she is trustworthy, right or wrong for a job, etc. “Therefore, leaders should not fear to act on those judgments, provided that they are also attuned to others’ moods.”

How do you become socially smarter? The authors recommend that you find a mentor with excellent social intelligence skills who’s able to coach you.

Are you a socially intelligent leader? The authors list seven social intelligence qualities: empathy; attunement; organizational awareness; influence; developing others; inspiration; and teamwork. The article has a handy chart with questions to help you find out if you qualify as a socially intelligent leader.

(Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, "Social intelligence and the biology of leadership," Harvard Business Review, September 2008.)

What is leadership?

Leadership is often discussed but rarely defined. If you don’t know what leadership is—if it’s not a clearly internalized value—how can you be a leader? The author of this article believes that this simple mantra can be used to define leadership:

“Leadership is about having the self-confidence to do what is right even when it is not popular.”

Not just for managers

Leadership as defined above isn’t just for managers. When a manager inserts himself/herself into the process, line staff may know that the decision isn’t right for a particular circumstance. In fact the decision may even make the decision-maker look foolish, but the staff member “says nothing to the manager because, after all, he is the boss.”

Managers don’t always have all the information they need to make an informed decision. They rely on staff to supply them with “information that will help them make the right choices. Few managers try to make decisions without the counsel of others. However, not enough employees step up and raise their concerns early in the process.”

Creating a culture of communication

Organizations need to create a culture where employees are encouraged to speak up before the “ship hits the iceberg.” “Growth comes from people challenging the status quo and feeling confident that they can present ideas…without retribution.”

“Oftentimes, the best ideas are found by talking with those who do the work every day. People need to feel empowered to share what they feel is right.”

(Lee B. Salz, "The sales dodo: What is leadership?" Sales & Marketing Management’s ManageSmarter, Jul. 24, 2008.)

Timeless leadership

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest March 2008

David McCullough, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of John Adams and 1776, describes the qualities of “timeless leadership.”

One of the essential ingredients of great leadership is the ability to spot talent. “Good leaders also judge people by how they handle failure … [They] don’t tolerate self-pity in themselves or others.” But those who have never failed “may not have what it takes when the going gets rough.”

Essential to leadership are three qualities identified by Douglas Southall Freeman: “Know your stuff, be a man, look after your men.”

  • Know your stuff. Have expertise, experience and knowledge; do the work required to know a subject — not just accruing information, but learning how to analyze problems, learning to do things by doing them. You can’t learn to play the piano by reading a book about it.
  • Be a man. (Regardless of gender) Have the “attributes of courage—backbone—resilience, and strength of character.” See the strengths in others. Be someone “who can be counted on when the chips are down.”
  • Look after your men. Take care of your staff. Take a “genuine interest in them.” Be empathetic. Treat them well.

A fourth essential quality of leadership, says McCullough, is the power of persuasion. But great leadership begins with listening.

Rebecca Rimel, head of the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia, exemplifies great leadership. “She is a visionary who is able to generate a great sense of mission. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and she’s willing to take risks. She personifies the old adages ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ ‘Any job worth doing is worth doing well,’ and ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ Those are all the kinds of things your grandmother used to say, and they probably can’t be said too often. Samuel Johnson once observed that we ‘more frequently require to be reminded than informed.’”

(Bronwyn Fryer, “Timeless leadership: A conversation with David McCullough,” Harvard Business Review, March 2008.)

Leading with authenticity

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest January 2008 and Leader's Digest May 2007

A review of True North

by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest January 2008

The book True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership by Bill George and Peter Sims (Wiley, 2007) argues that authentic leaders, guided by their most sacred values (their true north) “lead with their hearts as well as their heads, inspiring loyalty and commitment from those they lead.”

How does one become an authentic leader? To discover this, the book’s authors interviewed 125 business leaders, many of whom reported “that crucible experiences forged the principles that define their leadership.”

To begin your journey as an authentic leader, ask yourself questions in these key areas:

  • Self-Awareness. What are my strengths and weaknesses? How do others see me?
  • Values. “What are my most deeply held values?”
  • Motivations. “What drives me?”
  • Support. Whom do I count on?
  • Integrated life. “How can I integrate all facets of my life to be a whole, balanced person?”

“An engaging book filled with richly detailed stories, True North will inspire new and established leaders alike to consider how well they follow their own true north in their personal and professional lives.”

(Rolf Dobelli, “Leading with Authenticity: A Review of True North," Harvard Management Update, January 2008.)

The authentic leader

by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest May 2007

The best leaders are not the "follow me over the hill" type. Instead, they lead from the heart as well as the head, and their leadership style springs from their fundamental character and values. Harvard Business School professor Bill George discusses his new book True North, co-written with Peter Sims. Key concepts include:

  • Leadership style can be broken down into takers and givers. Takers are often charismatic personalities who end up making decisions to enrich their own coffers and careers. Givers, on the other hand, create value and empower employees to become leaders.
  • The life of a leader can be lonely. Seek continuing help from mentors and truthful advisers.
  • Authentic leadership can be taught through a series of five steps that lead to self-awareness.

These five steps include:

  1. Knowing your "authentic self," i.e., learning to be self-aware.
  2. Focusing on the values and principles that matter to you.
  3. Discovering what motivates you.
  4. Building a support team.
  5. Trying to forge "an integrated life" that augments work with such things as family, friends, community service, exercise, church and whatever else matters in your life.

(Bill George, "The authentic leader," Harvard Business School Working Knowledge podcast, May 2, 2007 and book review on Amazon.com.)

Trust: the secret weapon of effective business leaders

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest June 2007

A recent book by Kathy Bloomgarden, Co-CEO of Ruder Finn, Inc., a top global public relations agency, Trust, The Secret Weapon of Effective Business Leaders (St Martin’s Press, 2007), stresses the importance of trust in an organization’s corporate strategy.

From the book:

In today’s environment, leaders who add the most value to their companies tend to make decisions based not on short-term financial goals, but on strongly-held values. They develop a reservoir of trust among their key stakeholders and use it to speak frankly as challenges arise. These leaders are inspired by an adherence to principles that form, for each of them, a platform of rock-solid values they will not violate.

One review describes the book as “an essential read” for business leaders. Well-written and relevant, it “defines what it means to be an effective leader in today’s rough and tumble business environment.”

In a Harvard Business Review IdeaCast interview, “Bloomgarden explains that for modern-day business leaders to be successful, they must create for themselves a reputation of trustworthiness, both for their own job security and for the future success of their organizations.” A recent Gallup Poll reveals that only 20% of the American public views CEOs as trustworthy, and in 2006 almost 1500 CEOs were forced out of their positions. Performance alone isn’t enough any more. Trusted leaders can draw on established trust to navigate through tough spots, and their organizations attract top employees. To establish a reputation for trust, leaders must:

  • Stick with long-term goals.
  • Be committed to ongoing communication.
  • Proactively reach out.
  • Be visible and accessible.
  • Inspire--share your long-term vision.

How successful leaders think

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest June 2007

The June 2007 Harvard Business Review cover story, “How successful leaders think,” points out that the focus on what a leader does is misplaced. Instead, we need to look at how leaders think, i.e., to examine the “ways in which leaders’ cognitive processes produce their actions.”

Successful leaders have a rather unusual trait in common: they can “hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both.”

The author, Roger Martin (Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and author, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, calls this process of consideration and synthesis “integrative thinking.” He believes it’s “a defining characteristic of most exceptional businesses and the people who run them.”

Decision making involves four separate and distinct stages. Everybody goes through these stages, but integrative thinkers approach the steps differently.

  1. Determining salience: Conventional thinkers focus only on obviously relevant features; integrative thinkers seek less obvious but potentially relevant factors.
  2. Analyzing causality: Conventional thinkers consider one-way, linear relationships between variables; integrative thinkers consider multidirectional, nonlinear relationships among variables.
  3. Envisioning the decision architecture: Conventional thinkers break problems into pieces and work on them separately or sequentially; integrative thinkers see problems as a whole, examining how the parts fit together and how decisions affect one another.
  4. Achieving resolution: Conventional thinkers make either-or choices and settle for best available options; integrative thinkers creatively resolve tensions among opposing ideas and generate innovative outcomes.

(Roger Martin, “How successful leaders think,” Harvard Business Review, June 2007.)

Pernicious myth: Leadership ability--either you have it or you don't

by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest April 2007

One of the most "pernicious myths about leadership is that the ability to lead is a mysterious, almost magical power that only a lucky few possess." In this interview, Marty Linsky, cofounder of Cambridge Leadership Associates and an adjunct lecturer at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, talks "about the error of this myth and describes steps that anyone--at any level in an organization--can take to become more effective at exercising leadership." Every essential leadership skill can be taught and learned.

The two most important leadership skills are relationship skills and the ability to let others take the reins.

Leadership also entails risk. Critical steps to becoming a better leader include:

  • Clarify your purpose. What are you willing to take risks on behalf of?
  • Practice Getting on the Balcony [stepping back and asking yourself, "What's really going on here?"]
    • How are you understood by others?
    • What are your predictable responses that enable others to undermine your interventions?
    • What behaviors do you need to nurture to broaden your tool kit?

"With self-awareness, you can create a plan of action. You can identify what leadership skills you need to start practicing and stretching." (Marty Linsky, Christina Bielaszka-Duverna, "Conventional wisdom: 'Leadership ability--you either have it or you don't'," Harvard Management Update, Apr 1, 2007.)

In praise of the incomplete leader

by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest February 2007

Notes on the Harvard Business Review article "In praise of the incomplete leader" provided by Leslie Dillon, originally in Leader's Digest February 2007.

The authors of this article believe that no one person can be all things to all people, and they've developed a framework of distributed leadership that consists of four capabilities:

  • Sensemaking: able to understand and map the context in which a company and its people operate. These leaders can quickly identify a situation's complexities and explain them to others.
  • Relating: able to build trusting relationships within and across organizations by inquiring, advocating, and connecting.
  • Visioning: able to create a compelling vision of the future. This is a "collaborative process that articulates what the members of an organization want to create."
  • Inventing: able to develop new ways to achieve that vision.

It's rare for any "single person be skilled in all four areas." Here's how incomplete leaders differ from incompetent leaders: "They understand what they’re good at and what they’re not and have good judgment about how they can work with others to build on their strengths and offset their limitations." It's critical that leaders find [and develop the ability in] others to "offset their limitations and complement their strengths. Those who don't will...find themselves at the helm of an unbalanced ship." [Emphasis added] Take the test!

You might want to wait for a really good day to look at these, but here are some signs to watch for.

  • Signs of weak sensemaking
  1. You feel strongly that you are usually right and others are often wrong.
  2. You feel your views describe reality correctly, but others’ views do not.
  3. You find you are often blindsided by changes in your organization or industry.
  4. When things change, you typically feel resentful. (That’s not the way it should be!)
  • Signs of weak relating
  1. You blame others for failed projects.
  2. You feel others are constantly letting you down or failing to live up to your expectations.
  3. You find that many of your interactions at work are unpleasant, frustrating, or argumentative.
  4. You find many of the people you work with untrustworthy.
  • Signs of weak visioning
  1. You feel your work involves managing an endless series of crises.
  2. You feel like you’re bouncing from pillar to post with no sense of larger purpose.
  3. You often wonder, “Why are we doing this?” or “Does it really matter?”
  4. You can’t remember the last time you talked to your family or a friend with excitement about your work.
  • Signs of weak inventing
  1. Your organization’s vision seems abstract to you.
  2. You have difficulty relating your organization’s vision to what you are doing today.
  3. You notice dysfunctional gaps between your organization’s aspirations and the way work is organized.
  4. You find that things tend to revert to business as usual.

(Deborah Ancona, Thomas W. Malone, Wanda J. Orlikowski, Peter M. Senge, "In praise of the incomplete leader", Harvard Business Review, February 2007)

Courage as a skill

by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest January 2007

Courageous action is "a special kind of calculated risk taking" learned and refined over time. Good leaders are willing "to make bold moves," but they make those moves "through careful deliberation and preparation." Business courage is a skill acquired gradually through decision-making processes.

Taking an intelligent gamble requires an understanding of the “courage calculation”: six discrete decision-making processes that increase the likelihood of success:

  • Setting primary and secondary goals
  • Determining the importance of achieving those goals
  • Tipping the balance of power in your favor
  • Weighing risks against benefits
  • Selecting the proper time for action
  • Developing contingency plans

Desmond Tutu has said that good leaders have an "uncanny sense of timing." These questions can help you determine if the time is right:

  • Why am I pursuing this now?
  • Am I contemplating a considered action or an impulsive one?
  • How long would it take to become better prepared? Is that too long?
  • What are the pros and cons of waiting a day, two days, a week or more?
  • What are the political obstacles? Can these be either removed or reduced in the near future?
  • Can I take steps now that will create a foundation for a courageous move later?
  • Am I emotionally and mentally prepared to take this risk?
  • Do I have the expertise, communication skills, track record, and credibility to make this work?

(Kathleen K. Reardon, "Courage as a skill", Harvard Business Review, Jan. 2007.)

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