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True leader motivates the entire team for the attainment of common organizational goals. A leader always leads the way by his actions and includes the employees in decision-making, strategising and implementing new plans.
A successful leader follows the three R’s rule:
- Respect for Self
- Respect for Others
- Responsibility for their Actions
What is Leadership and who is a Leader?
Leadership is the art of of motivating people and directing their efforts for the accomplishment of objectives. Leadership helps to inspire people to work, boosts new ideas and innovation.
A leader encourages the team, provides the direction and vision for improving the performance levels.
Traits of a successful Leader.
Anyone can learn the art of leading, and benefit from successful leadership. Let’s check below the traits of a successful leader:
- Positive Thinking: Positive thinking helps leaders to achieve more through their teams. There is no such business in the world that has not faced failures or tough times. But how you deal with it, matters. Positivity helps to develop a growth mindset and the teams are able to deal with the failures too. Positive thinking in a team leads everyone to believe that every problem has a solution, and they can achieve anything, they want to.
- Delegation: Many leaders face a hard time delegating work, as they think that their subordinates will not be able to complete the work with the same efficiency. But, one can delegate if the team member can complete the task with 70% accuracy of the desired level of expectations. Delegation helps the leaders to get more time for strategic decisions. Also, it gives the feeling of involvement among teammates.
- Teamwork: Teamwork is involving everyone in the team in the decisions and work. Goals can never be achieved by any one person, and it involves the combined efforts of the entire team. Different team members from different backgrounds, cultures, capabilities, have different experiences, expertise and can contribute in a great way that can benefit the whole organization.
- Critical thinking: Critical thinking involves thinking beyond the visible and obvious solutions. It includes skillfully analyzing the problem and evaluating the data generated applying logic, and experience to arrive at the best possible solution. A good leader knows the importance of critical thinking and promotes the same among his team members.
Being positive in a negative situation is not naive, it’s leadership. – Ralph Marston
- Strong communicator: Effective communicators know the way of communicating the information clearly among the team members. It includes not only the top-bottom approach but also the bottom-up approach. A successful leader makes the uninterrupted flow of ideas and information in the organization. Clear communication also helps in motivating people and achieving better results.
- Emotional Intelligence: Great leaders have high emotional intelligence in which they are aware of their emotional states and emotions of others. These leaders put themselves in the situation of others to understand the depth of the problems. They know very well that how words and actions have an impact on others’ emotional states. This quality helps the leaders to manage the teams under stressful situations and helps in building strong relations.
- Continuous learner: True leaders focus on learning new skills and making improvements to foster growth in an organization. They know that learning is a continuous process, and it helps in the development of team members and the organization.
- Not micro-managing: Micro-managing lacks the trust factor among the leaders and team members as it involves in-depth checking of work at every step. This leads to the killing of creative thinking and innovation capabilities of team members. Whereas less interference in the work of employees leads to better performance.
- Active listener: Active listening is a critical leadership skill that encourages strong communication between leaders and team members. A good leader always pays attention to what others are saying and minimizes distractions when communicating with others. This gives the team members a feeling of being valued and helps in driving employee engagement.
- Transparency: Transparency means being honest with the team members and communicating clearly. Transparency prevents the employees from making false assumptions about various problems and scenarios. It promotes integrity, loyalty, and trust in an organization.
To conclude, Some people already have many qualities of a good leader, but it is not difficult to develop the qualities too. Leadership has nothing to do with the position in an organization and a leader doesn’t need to be at the top of an organizational hierarchy. A successful leader has a high level of motivation, enthusiasm, and self-confidence to work for the benefit of the organization along with his team members. A great leader is a strong motivator, communicator, honest, continuous learner, and is one who believes in teamwork.