Attributes of good leaders

What are the attributes that every leader, be she a mid-level manager or a CEO, need to have to be highly effective? Technical competency and domain knowledge? Obviously, although these are different for different industries or functional areas. Below is the list of industry- and functional-independent attributes which I think a good leader must possess. I will not go into deep details for each of the attribute because that would make this post very long. Therefore, I will leave the elaboration of each of the attributes to subsequent posts.

High emotional intelligence (EQ). EQ is the ability to understand, manage, and influence self’s and others’ feeling and therefore essential for effective leadership, which is mostly about working with people and making the best out of them. A person with low EQ does not know how to listen, how to respond, and how to behave properly to different people in different situations. And such person can’t be a good leader.

Ability to articulate a vision and inspire people in that vision. Not only needs an organization a vision, even a project also needs one. A vision fosters a desired culture, establishes a compelling mission and envisions a future, enables turn-around (if one is needed), and creates a synergy among members so that they can enthusiastically and steadily move towards the shared goal and never lose focus. Without a vision, autonomy and things like that are just the management dream.

Ability to see everyone’s strengths and put them in the right jobs. The focus on strengths, instead of weaknesses enables outstanding achievement and high staff satisfaction. Don’t give an engineer bad rating for his poor technical writing skills, give him a good rating for his outstanding problem-solving skills and hire another person to do the writing instead.

Ability to grow and develop people. This includes things like giving proper feedbacks, setting examples, investing in suitable training, delegating well, setting smart goals, and buying them coffee (I’m not joking). If the leader gets hit by a bus, somebody in the team must be capable of taking his role. Or better yet, the team does not need a leader at all (except for someone to buy them coffee).

Passion. You can’t do great things and inspire others to do great things if you don’t love what you do. And passion must be revealed not just through the speeches but through actions. Say you love new technologies? Show your people that you do keep up and play with new technologies, or better yet, innovate new technologies.

Integrity, integrity, integrity. The leader must be a person his people trust. A high integrity leader treats his people with respect and is fair to all of them. (And being respectful does not mean leaders don’t sack the wrong people, those who lack of both skills and attitude to get things done and share no same value with the organization.) If there’s no integrity in the leader, all the other things are irrelevant at best. People don’t follow bosses who have no integrity. And there’s no leader without followers. Period.

Note that all these attributes do not stand in separation but are highly interrelated. You can’t grow people if you can’t see through their strengths and focus only on weaknesses. Likewise, you can’t articulate a vision and inspire your people if you don’t possess good EQ to understand and manage the differences of your people.

On the other hand, all of these attributes are learnable one can definitely learn to improve one’s capability to be an effective leader. There is no such thing as a born leader. Hardworking and continuous improvement are those that make people leaders.

If you work for a boss who displays all the above attributes, consider yourself very lucky. If you are the boss yourself and possess all these attributes, then congratulations!