Trait One: Honesty as a Leadership Quality

by Mark Shead
continued from Five Most Important Leadership Traits

People want to follow an honest leader. Years ago, many employees started out by assuming that their leadership was honest simply because the authority of their position. With modern scandals, this is no longer true.

When you start a leadership position, you need to assume that people will think you are a little dishonest. In order to be seen as an honest individual, you will have to go out of your way to display honesty. People will not assume you are honest simply because you have never been caught lying.

One of the most frequent places where leaders miss an opportunity to display honesty is in handling mistakes. Much of a leader’s job is to try new things and refine the ideas that don’t work. However, many leaders want to avoid failure to the extent that they don’t admit when something did not work.

There was a medium size organization that was attempting to move to a less centralized structure. Instead of one location serving an entire city, they wanted to put smaller offices throughout the entire metro area. At the same time, they were planning an expansion for headquarters to accommodate more customers at the main site. The smaller remote offices was heralded as a way to reach more customers at a lower cost and cover more demographic areas.

After spending a considerable amount of money on a satellite location, it became clear that the cost structure would not support a separate smaller office. As the construction completed on the expanded headquarters building, the smaller office was closed. This was good decision making. The smaller offices seemed like a good idea, but when the advantages didn’t materialize (due to poor management or incorrect assumptions) it made sense to abandon the model. This was a chance for the leadership to display honesty with the employees, be candid about why things didn’t work out as expected, learn from the mistakes an move on.

Unfortunately in this situation the leadership told employees that they had planned on closing the satellite location all along and it was just a temporary measure until construction was completed on the larger headquarters building. While this wasn’t necessarily true, it didn’t quite cross over into the area of lying. Within a few months the situation was mostly forgotten and everyone moved on. Few of the employees felt that leadership was being dishonest. However, they had passed up a marvelous opportunity to display the trait of honesty in admitting a mistake.

Opportunities to display honesty on a large scale may not happen every day. As a leader, showing people that you are honest even when it means admitting to a mistake, displays a key trait that people are looking for in their leaders. By demonstrating honesty with yourself, with your organization and with outside organizations, you will increase your leadership influence. People will trust someone who actively displays honesty–not just as an honest individual, but as someone who is worth following.

Five Most Important Leadership Traits

by Mark Shead

Some sit and pontificate about whether leaders are made or born. The true leader ignores such arguments and instead concentrates on developing the leadership qualities necessary for success. In this article, we are going to discuss five leadership traits or leadership qualities that people look for in a leader. If you are able to increase your skill in displaying these five quality characteristics, you will make it easier for people to want to follow you. The less time you have to spend on getting others to follow you, the more time you have to spend refining exactly where you want to go and how to get there.

The five leadership traits/leadership qualities are:

1. Honest
2. Forward-Looking
3. Competent
4. Inspiring
5. Intelligent

These five qualities come from Kouzes and Posner’s research into leadership that was done for the book The Leadership Challenge.

Your skill at exhibiting these five leadership qualities is strongly correlated with people’s desire to follow your lead. Exhibiting these traits will inspire confidence in your leadership. Not exhibiting these traits or exhibiting the opposite of these traits will decrease your leadership influence with those around you.

It is important to exhibit, model and display these traits. Simply possessing each trait is not enough; you have to display it in a way that people notice. People want to see that you actively demonstrate these leadership qualities and will not just assume that you have them. It isn’t enough to just be neutral. For example, just because you are not dishonest will not cause people to recognize that you are honest. Just avoiding displays of incompetence won’t inspire the same confidence as truly displaying competence.

The focus of each of these five traits needs to be on what people see you do–not just the things they don’t see you do. Being honest isn’t a matter of not lying–it is taking the extra effort to display honesty.

Being a Great Leader Isn't About Knowing All the Answers

by Nilofer Merchant, Rubicon Consulting

Have you ever started some new project, some new challenge -- all excited to make an impact — and then feel overwhelmed? A friend of mine was describing her first few days in a new leadership role. She started with a thinking exercise — a strategic review of what’s working, what needs fixing, where are the big opportunities.

And she heard a lot in the first 5 days. It felt a bit like a wave overcoming her or like drinking from a fire hose. In other words, it was daunting.

So then she started to question herself ... Am I going to really going to be able make an impact, what am I really doing here, who was crazy enough to hire me into this role? She got daunted enough to start to question her ability to lead.

She’s thinking to herself: “I should already know”. Because that is what leaders are supposed to do. And her “should” statement in her head was that if she didn’t already know the answer, she wasn’t the right leader for the role.

Might I just challenge that?

Yes, we champions of teams or projects should know something and clearly we do. The bias that we should “know already” assumes you’ve solved that particular problem before, but in today’s changing and challenging climate, that’s not often the case.

At higher levels of problem solving, the brilliance is in knowing what next question to ask and how to ask it ...to unfold the answer. You see, if my friend knows “the answer” this time, that’s one thing. But what is more powerful for her team, for her organization, is if they arrive at the answer(s) so that the capability of their ability to figure out the next problem is built.

Some advice for this situation

* Remember that when we are in self-doubt, we are usually operating out of fear. Somebody wise once said to me, we can operate out of fear or love and nothing good ever came from when we we operate out of fear. Instead, love the process rather than fear the ambiguity.

* Perhaps the “answer” is to figure out what questions need to be asked, and answered to know more. Build a list of questions that could help you map the situation more fully.

* Redefine leading from knowing already, to knowing how to know. Easy problems are easy. If you want to help your company solve the tough problem nuts, you gotta get comfortable with the fact that you will need to do more discovery to figure it out...

Let’s put to rest the notion that the goal of strategy creation is to get to one big win. That’s important, no doubt. But the ultimate goal is not to win once, but rather to build both the capability and capacity that power our organizations to win repeatedly.

In other words, getting strategy right depends on creating the conditions that let us outshine our competitors, and to outshine them on many levels—to out-think them, out-create them, and out-innovate the other players in the market. Collaborative strategy and leaderships plays into that specifically because it allows you to collaborate organizationally, pick from a relevant set of ideas, and then quickly and efficiently make decisions in the open. The framework of collaboration allows a whole organization to think and to make tough qualitative decisions, which is the key to winning moves.

So when in doubt about what you “should already know”, maybe just remember that great leaders help other people be better problem solvers, too -- and when you do that...you’ll only not only solve today’s problem, you’ll have built strength into ability to solve the next problem and the problem after that.

Nilofer Merchant is CEO and Chief Strategist of Rubicon Consulting. She has honed her unique, collaborative approach to solving tough problems while working with and for companies like Adobe, Apple, Nokia, HP and others; she's also the author of "The New How." This post was originally published on her blog, and is republished with permission.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/being-a-great-leader-isnt-about-knowing-all-the

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