Leadership Quality & Skills

Leadership quality & skills

Abstract: Leadership is the ability of a leader to guide, direct and influence people. A good leader should have several different capabilities at the same time in order to perfectly perform his or her duties. In this short essay, we will make a detailed explanation of essential attributes and competencies a good leader should possess.

Attributes

• Honesty

When a person is responsible for a team, it is important to raise the bar to make honest and ethical behavior a key value, as all the team members will follow suit. Ethic is the basic to build a business. Honesty will certainly help the team to keep a good and long-term customer relationship.

• Confidence

While being the leader in a team, this person will face lots of difficulties. It happens that his brand or his business is worrisome and things are not going as planned. At that moment, the important thing is not to panic. He should keep up the confidence level and assure that everyone stays in his place and makes efforts to reach the goal. The confidence of leader helps to raise the motivation of employees and to move the team ahead.

• Maturity

Usually people may think maturity refers to working experience or age, however, maturity is not automatically level up with years. This word can be transferred in terms such as: integrity, empathy, strength, planning, time management, decision-making etc.

Maturity is one of the essential ingredients of leadership. It is often transferred into (from Future of Leadership, Mindshift):

• Taking personal responsibility and not blaming others 
• Giving (or sharing) credit. Not taking credit for everything 
• Being open minded 
• Limiting his/her own wants for the benefit (and needs) of his/her people and organization (or department)

• Communication

Some ideas may seem very clear in the head, but if you try to explain it to others exactly what you want, there is often problems. The team leader should have a good skill of communication. It can be very useful during the meetings, negotiations, conferences etc. Communication skills make it easier to understand team members and customers, and to create a productive working environment.

• Adaptability to change

The modern market forces leaders to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, people and technology. It is the same situation that facing a fortune 500 company or a startup, the ability to adapt is paramount. The adaptability makes the working process more flexible and creative. The leader can also train the new team members with this skill. The adaptable mindset does not come naturally to everyone, the leader should learn the skill and train the employees after.

• Think outside the box
• Be an early adopter
• Don’t just say no
• Plan for the time of the year
• It all begins in the morning

(By Philip Murphy, Thin Difference)

• Charisma

A charismatic leader is able to gather team members through dint of personality and charm, rather than external power or authority. When the leader has a strong charisma, he will be able to draw others’ attention and when he talks with you, you may feel that you are the most important person in the world.

A charismatic leader is also very persuasive and make very effective use of body language as well as verbal language.

Conger & Kanungo (1998) describe five behavioral attributes of Charismatic Leaders:

• Vision and articulation;
• Sensitivity to the environment;
• Sensitivity to member needs;
• Personal risk taking;
• Performing unconventional behavior.

Competencies

Managers and top-level leaders should all develop variety competencies which can help them become more effective leaders.

• Social intelligence

Social intelligence, which is short for SI, is quite broad, but can be seen simply as the ability of getting along well with others and ability of operating effectively in a variety of social situations. It is also one of the most critical important factors for effective leadership. To develop SI, leaders should expose themselves to different people, different social situations, and work to develop their social perceptiveness and ability to engage others in conversation.