Marcia's Leadership Q and As: What Makes Great Leaders?

Q. Developing our natural leadership is continually important. How can we inspire everyone to work on leadership development?

A.  If you want an excellent opportunity to engage with your employees, give them a platform to express their creativity. Whether there are small groups of 10 or larger groups of several hundred, there are powerful ways to learn what’s working and not working in your organizations. 

Periodically, create venues for exploration and discussions about leadership. Discover how people define it. What is their experience? When employees share and reflect on what is not working, everyone can discover what’s possible. 

Teams of people can address the barriers to great leadership. Together they can define what kind of leadership they want to optimize and transform their enterprise. Then they can better serve the customers. 

There are driving forces that help leaders naturally develop. Here are some traits leaders have (which ones do you have?): a compelling purpose, ability to inspire others, build trust, listen actively, encourage challenging the status quo in order to innovate, recognize contributions, communicate effectively, behave with respect and integrity, make decisions and pivot as needed, foster collaboration, invest in the education and skills for all, create a learning environment, reduce fear and complexity, solve problems systematically at the root cause level, ask what and how (not who), and model humility, transparency, and authenticity. 

Driving Forces

Restraining forces can hinder leadership development throughout an organization. But great leaders will identify and remove barriers as quickly as possible. Like detectives, natural leaders and positional leaders act. Poor leaders need to pivot if they have a lack of purpose or direction, micromanage, don’t listen well, resist new ideas, fear and distrust others, communicate poorly, are unethical, don’t invest in people’s continual learning and development, sabotage the team’s work, criticize and blame people, demotivate people, refuse to be accountable for the results of the system, creates a judgmental and dysfunctional culture, acts as a bully, emphasizes their self-importance (is there an over- abundance of selfies and low self-esteem?), and rules with a hierarchical structure. 

Restraining Forces

As you reflect on your own leadership behaviors as well as those colleagues in your organization, you can rapidly discern which traits are obvious. Based on these, essential conversations may need to occur if leaders are to achieve better results. 

The quality of leadership has a direct correlation to the results the organization can achieve. The questions are, “Are you happy with the results you’re achieving?” and “Does anyone care about profits?”