The Most Important 5 Characteristics For Effective Leaders

Cultivating effective leaders requires a balance of previous experience and training. While many leadership skills can be taught, most are built on a core foundation of learned behaviours. Importantly, these are what separate the good leaders from the great leaders.

Although people in leadership roles can build up this experience, it certainly helps for leadership candidates to have it already because it can give them a head start and make them more effective.

So, let’s look at some of the most important characteristics of effective leaders to help you identify them more easily in your next set of potential leaders.

The Most Important Characteristics for Effective Leaders

1. Confidence

We’ll start with an obvious one: confidence. Standing up in front of people and inspiring them to achieve goals requires quite a lot of confidence. It also sets a good foundation for many of the skills discussed below, particularly resilience, communication, and decision-making.

For many, confidence is a learned behaviour that comes from repeated exposure to situations that require it. However, by the time people are on the leadership track, their confidence levels should be fairly well-developed. It can be taught in leadership training, but the length of time it takes to become confident means it’s preferable to already have it developed.

2. Communication

Communication is another skill that can be taught, but an effective leader will already be a good communicator. After all, you’d like to think that someone who’s on track to be a leader will be able to speak clearly and effectively to the teams they’re leading. It influences everything from teams working towards the same goal to dealing with feedback professionally.

The ability to communicate effectively isn’t an innate skill – we pick it up through practice and reinforcement. Generally, those who have excelled in their careers will be effective communicators because it’s a necessary skill for pretty much any business environment. It can certainly be developed through training programmes, but it helps to have a solid foundation.

3. Decisiveness

We all make hundreds of decisions in our personal and professional lives every day. However, some of us are much better at it than others. This is the difference between a decision-maker and someone decisive. While it’s not always about making the right decisions, it’s about making decisions quickly and effectively that (at the time) seem like the best.

As such, decisiveness means the decision-maker needs to be able to defend their choices – both to those above them and those they follow.

A thought-out decision should be backed by data, but should equally be revised if new data is available. This demonstrates maturity and willingness to listen, which separate great leaders from good ones.

It’s possible to train someone to be decisive, but it’s essentially the culmination of numerous skills in one. It can come down to experience, then, as you’ll want to build on the range of skills that make someone good at making effective decisions under pressure.

4. Trustworthiness

This should be an obvious one for effective leaders. After all, how can you work for someone you don’t trust, and how can you be seen as a credible leader if you can’t be trusted? It’s not possible to teach trustworthiness as a skill because, much like decisiveness, it’s more the result of several traits.

For example, being seen as trustworthy involves:

• Good communication
• Making decisions and following through with them
• Being open about mistakes (both personal and those made by others)
• Providing clear feedback and being receptive to it in turn
• Building professional relationships built on equity and expectations

So, trustworthiness isn’t even really a learned behaviour – it’s more of a perceived behaviour. Telling people someone is trustworthy doesn’t mean anything unless those who need to put their trust in someone have seen it demonstrated.

But what does this mean for effective leaders? Well, it means you may have more success promoting leaders from within teams rather than hiring externally, as they will have established relationships within the workplace. Regardless of who you bring in to be a leader, they should genuinely want to be seen as trustworthy by those they lead.

5. Resilience

Being an effective leader means not only making mistakes but being able to bounce back from them. This brings us back to the decisiveness point above. Leaders won’t always make the right decisions, but they should always work with their mistakes.

Resilience involves several important leadership traits, such as self-reflection and strategic thinking. Like other skills mentioned so far, it’s something that’s far more effective when it’s learned through experience than taught through training. In theory, every mistake we make leads to us being more resilient to future failure and being open about failing is just as important.

Read More: How Long Should A Leadership Development Programme Be?

Building on Characteristics for Effective Leaders

The skills discussed above are often best developed over time, ideally before someone reaches a leadership position. This is because they almost all come from experience of specific situations – making mistakes, learning from them, speaking to others, etc.

But how do these feed into the better-known characteristics of leadership and the ones that can be taught and developed once someone is in a position of authority? Here are some suggestions.

1. Motivation and Empowerment

It’s perfectly possible to learn processes for motivating and empowering people. These might include management strategies, offering rewards, recognising success, and more. Provided you’re used to working with people, learning how to empower and motivate them shouldn’t be too difficult.

That said, the important foundational skills are communication, trustworthiness, and, to a lesser extent, confidence. For example, a leader needs to know the right motivation and empowerment strategies for their teams, which will differ depending on the people and their goals. They also need to be trusted to create the relationship needed to be able to inspire.

Empowerment is just as teachable as motivation. Typically, it involves delegating to employees and providing them with the right tools for success. A lot of the process comes down to decisiveness and strategic thinking then, as it requires leaders to identify those who would benefit from empowerment and choose the right situations and tools for the job.

2. Leading by Example

One of the foundational differences between managers and leaders is the latter’s ability to inspire by example. This might be implementing and enacting a new policy or process, or simply getting stuck in with some of the less desirable tasks on a project. A good leader should never expect employees to do something they wouldn’t do themselves.

Leading by example requires plenty of confidence, trustworthiness, and decisiveness. In a sense, it can be taught because leading by example is in essence a way of adjusting one’s working processes to the business needs. For example, this might mean learning strategic thinking and applying it to the team’s needs. If you spot an area of potential weakness or failure, throwing yourself into the grunt work is a great way to get it done.

3. Building Effective Working Relationships

Although it’s unnecessary to be friends with everyone at work, building effective, professional relationships is well worth the time investment. Leaders should do so with both their teams and their bosses because there are plenty of times when leaders act as middlemen in a larger corporate ladder.

Unsurprisingly, this requires confidence and good communication. While you can’t teach someone to want to be sociable, you can certainly teach them the foundations for developing good relationships at work. Bear in mind, though, that these aren’t friendships but are rather professional working relationships.

So, how can this be taught? Well, it might involve developing routines for consistent communication, such as doing daily rounds of a team’s working area to discuss project updates. It might also mean learning active listening skills and developing habits for regular catch-ups with people at all levels in the company. It’s perfectly possible to learn networking skills, which is what this comes down to.

Final Thoughts Of Characteristics For Effective Leaders

The most important Characteristics for effective leaders will have a wealth of useful skills that can be built on through training. These skills are pretty much all experience-based and form a good foundation for the best leaders.

As such, the best strategy for developing leaders at your organisation is to identify these skills in your potential future leaders and nurture them over time. From there, it’ll be easy to apply explicit, taught leadership skills once they’re ready for promotion into positions of authority.