What are the characteristics of a good leader?

Words: Saima Omar

Many leaders wonder how to best present their characteristics be perceived as a good leader by their staff. Most people are often quick to recognize bad leadership. But how can you identify a good leader, and how can you emphasize your strengths outwardly to improve your team’s morale?

Intrinsically, leaders are an important part of shaping the organization’s vision. It’s vital that we have good leaders to guide the organization and to make the important large-scale decisions that keep the business moving forward.

As a leader, you may be unaware of some of your strengths that helped land you in the position you’re in now. From big picture thinking and gaining consensus for organizational initiatives to developing your employees and displaying courage, you wouldn’t be a leader without a high degree of some of these qualities. If you haven’t identified them in yourself, you’ve likely acquired them without knowing it, or naturally display these talents.

But if you want to maximize your leadership, educating yourself around the key characteristics exhibited by good leaders across the world can cultivate your awareness and focus on your own development.

Knowing the characteristics of a good leader is a good starting point. Leadership statistics founded by CompareCamp only 10% of CEOs are natural leaders who lead by example, and only 22% of teams believe their leader has a clear direction for the future.

Five important characteristics of a good leader:

Integrity – Although this might not make the cut for being a recognized metric for employee evaluations, leading with honesty and integrity is a vital characteristic for good leadership.
Ability to delegate – A good leader can delegate towards his or her team’s growth. The best leaders build trust with their staff to delegate more effectively with an eye on opportunities for growth.
Self-awareness – It is said that the better you understand yourself and recognize your own strengths and weaknesses, the more operative you can be as a leader. Leaders that work to improve this quality are more adaptive, resilient, and accepting of feedback from others.
Communication – Good leaders are adept communicators who are able to communicate in a variety of ways, from conveying information, unifying vision, delivering feedback, to motivating others.
Empathy – Empathy can affect work performance and is a key part of emotional intelligence and leadership success. Being empathetic as a leader will allow you to help employees who are struggling to improve on performance and excel through built trust and rapport.

For many leaders, the following list is a familiar arsenal of values that are helpful to recommit to, and for those unfamiliar, it is a set of tools in which you can more actively take your career into your own hands:

A good leader prioritizes personal development

Leaders who prioritize their personal development are often better leaders. You are never too old or too experienced to learn, so leaders who strive to work on themselves are going to get better at leading over time.

You should not only focus on your professional development, but your emotional development, too. Leaders who work on their emotional intelligence are adaptive, resilient, and more accepting of feedback. Look for courses or networks that help you develop your emotional intelligence, and you will not only thrive in your work life, but also in your personal life.

A good leader will focus on developing others

This leadership quality is based on the situational leadership theory, which suggests that no single form of leadership is best. Instead, it is implied that leaders should be flexible and willing to adapt to the teams they have presented to them and focus on developing those individuals to shape their team.

Great leaders adapt their leadership style to suit the team they are working with and get the best from their employees, leading by example to take the team where they need to go.

A good leader inspires others

You might think that leadership is mainly about strategy and quantitative data, but research shows this isn’t the full picture. The best way to get the most out of your team is to be an inspirational leader. A good way to remain inspirational is to see the previous headers under ‘five characteristics of a good leader’, with attention to the point about empathy.

Inspirational leaders inspire action and motivate their teams to do better. Employees who feel inspired demonstrate three key characteristics; they are truly dedicated, they are accountable, and they present their best work.

To be an inspiring leader, ask yourself:

Are you being authentic?
Are you passionate about your work?
Are you knowledgeable, and continuously striving to increase your knowledge?
Are you engaging the team?
Are you personable?
As a leader, are you self-aware?
And finally, are you resilient?

A good leader is decisive

Part of being an effective leader is having the decisiveness to take risks and the willingness to take responsibility if something goes wrong. Leaders are openly willing to hold themselves accountable, but not as a vanity gesture. Leaders are aware that the buck stops with them, and their team is aware of this.

A good leader is continuously striving to learn

Good leaders love training, but they like to develop in other ways, too. Harvard Business School says that good leaders learn to network strategically.

In this article, they state: “networking – creating a fabric of personal contacts who will provide support, feedback, insight, resources, and information – is simultaneously one of the most self-evident and one of the most dreaded development challenges that aspiring leader must address.”

But finding the opportunity to network with peers is often a challenge faced by many leaders. This is one of the reasons why Dr. John Behr, executive coach with over 25 years of experience founded LeaderBridge. A tech platform available on desktop or as an app, to help leaders find a match with other executives.

LeaderBridge can help you find executive peers

Many leaders have issues finding external peers they can relate to. The LeaderBridge platform allows you to anonymously connect with other leaders to ask them questions and learn from their lived experiences. There’s no sales or job hunting allowed on the site and all members are vetted to confirm their identity, so you know you’re talking to people who you can relate to.

For more information, read more about LeaderBridge.