5 Essential Leadership Traits

In addition to having vision and charisma, great leaders cultivate trust, respect, and loyalty in others, while inspiring them to learn new skills and achieve career milestones. Here are some of the most important traits leaders need to successfully lead an organization.

1. Powerful and Clear Communication
   Communication is an essential component of effective leadership. The art of good communication, however, involves more complexity and nuance than many realize. It isn’t enough to regularly communicate with your team members and encourage them to communicate back. Excellent communication requires clear and precise language, sincerity and honesty, the ability to adjust to a variety of different audiences. To communicate well, you also have hone your active listening skills. By taking the time to understand other people’s opinions and feelings and by being transparent and sincere in your own communication, you can earn the trust you need to successfully lead a team. – https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/communication-1-idea-3-facts-5-tips/ 

2. The Ability to Inspire and Empathize
   The best leaders have the ability to understand what other people care about and can empathize with their emotions and values. Empathy is important in leadership because it allows leaders to identify what motivates individual team members. Thus, empathy is closely tied to the ability to inspire. When leaders can show that they care deeply about their work and about their team, they can inspire employees to improve their performance and collaborate with one another to reach team goals. – https://www.forbes.com/sites/prudygourguechon/2017/12/26/empathy-is-an-essential-leadership-skill-and-theres-nothing-soft-about-it/?sh=3d791792b9da

3. The Ability to Make the Complex Simple
   Bill Gates has long advocated for the ability to make the complex simple as an essential leadership trait. According to Gates, “Complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares, and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.” Part of a leader’s responsibility is to solve meaningful problems and implement changes that make products and processes better. However, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by details to such an extent that it inhibits progress. Great leaders know how to identify and concisely define a problem and come up with a straightforward solution. – https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/08/zuckerberg-should-steal-this-wisdom-from-bill-gates-harvard-address.html

4. The Drive to Advance Diversity
   Excellent leaders value diversity and work to make their organization more inclusive. Studies have shown that diversity increases the bottom line for companies by 19%. Improving diversity and inclusivity are not only the right things to do, but they also improve creativity, productivity, and profits. One challenge that advancing diversity entails, is being aware of the individuals within the organization who have resistance to that goal. It’s important to customize your communication and move everyone towards a more diverse workplace in stages. – https://www.forbes.com/sites/annapowers/2018/06/27/a-study-finds-that-diverse-companies-produce-19-more-revenue/?sh=4a10543b506f

5. The Ability to Meet All People at All Levels
   The most successful leaders can meet all people at all levels in a way that is useful. They know how to create more settings on their dial and calibrate their leadership to each audience. Leading effectively means understanding what is important to the company and its employees, knowing the challenges of your employees, adjusting your priorities accordingly. Communicating flexibly with every employee helps to ensure collective performance. There are numerous traits that can make someone an exceptional leader. Many leadership characteristics are innate, while others can be acquired through education, practice, and determination. Some of the most important qualities a leader can have include clear communication, the ability to find simple solutions to complex problems, a commitment to inclusivity, and the ability to meet all people at all levels.

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