Are you leading? Or is your team bleeding? What qualities of a good leader do you already possess and where should you focus to improve? These are questions you’ll be able to answer after reading this blog post.
Investing in your leadership qualities can generate huge benefits. Not only do you experience higher self-esteem and genuine satisfaction from your work, but so will your team members. The success of your business will, of course, be the real icing on the cake for everyone.
See the ‘qualities of a good leader’ and ‘an effective team’ below, but first I’ll cover the qualities of a ‘bleeding team’ and ‘an ineffective leader’. Which camp do you see yourself and your team in?
Qualities of an ineffective team (bleeding team)
- Low morale
- Time wastage
- Work duplication
- Unproductive
- Conflict
- Blame game
- “I/me” focused rather than team and company focused
- Low quality work
- Lacking initiative
- Fearful
- Tired
Qualities of an ineffective leader
- Indecisive
- Disorganized
- Micro-manager
- Ego driven
- Unapproachable
- Authoritative
- Task focused
- Divisive
- Short-sighted
- Poor listener
- Emotionally disconnected
Qualities of a good leader
1. Outcomes focused
People are all different and while many may want details on ‘how’ to generate the outcomes, a lot of self-motivated people will want to adapt and work out the best ways for them to reach the desired outcomes. Being a leader who focuses on the outcomes and allows your team to work out the best way to get there allows team members to become creative, explorative and adaptive. This leads to greater satisfaction for team members.
2. Strategic
Being strategic in leadership requires the ability to plan for long term growth while maintaining short-term financial stability.
3. Inspiring
A good leader is able to inspire passion within their team. It is not enough to just be passionate as a leader, a good leader is able to inspire the whole team to similarly feel and enact on the passion for the business vision and mission.
4. Effective communicator
A good leader is an effective communicator. You’ll be an active listener, be generous with your time and be present, build trust and rapport – relationships, be clear and succinct, good at asking questions and providing feedback and most of all, be empathetic.
5. Emotionally intelligent
Emotional intelligence is one of the most important qualities of a good leader. Most successful leaders are skilled in this area.
Emotional intelligence is about having personal awareness around your own emotions and behaviour and having the self-management skills to positively manage your behaviour and tendencies. It also includes social awareness around other people’s moods, behaviours and motives and being able to respond effectively to improve those relationships.
This article gives a good overview of important habits of highly emotionally intelligent people.
6. Highly organised and systematic
Systems are essential for time, quality and efficiencies management. They save time and provide for continual improvement and updating. Without them, you’ll be continually covering old ground and fail to move forward.
As a leader, you’ll be in high demand. Managing your time and being highly organised around your tasks is imperative. Otherwise, you will be thrown from one fire to the next and drift away from your most high value and strategic tasks that you should be focused on.
7. Consistent
A good leader maintains consistency around actions and behaviours within the business and relationships. This is particularly important when dealing with individual team members. All team members are treated the same – consistently.
8. Has an open door policy
A good leader is approachable. An open-door policy is essential for team mentoring, skill-building, systems improvements and relationships. A good leader is also mindful of how to manage their open-door policy, so it doesn’t interfere with their own productivity.
9. Confident
Being seen as confident provides a calming effect on your team. You may not always feel confident, but your team needs to feel that you are.
A confident leader is decisive and even if those decisions turn out to be wrong decisions, you’ll confidently admit to your mistake and go about making new decisions to move forward.
Building self-confidence will help you become a more confident leader.
10. Informed
As a good leader, you’ll stay up to date with facts and information and feed it through to your team.
If you are demonstrating the qualities above, then you are an effective leader and your team should reflect the qualities of an effective team, below.
Qualities of an effective team
When your team is no longer running around leaking time, chasing their tail, unsure of their role, etc. they become a much more effective team and these are the qualities that you can expect them to be demonstrating:
- Proactive
- Collaborative
- Confident
- Supportive
- Productive
- Motivated
How do you shape us a leader?
After assessing yourself and your team against the qualities outlined for a bleeding team, an ineffective leader, an effective team and the qualities of a good leader, how do you stack up? Where could you focus to improve your qualities of a good leader?
If you are unsure and would like more information on becoming a better leader, please contact us.
