8 Must-Have Leadership Qualities

Updated January 20, 2019

Being a leader is one of the most difficult (yet rewarding) roles that you can have. You get to inspire a group to do their very best work. This doesn’t sound so difficult but people are people. Every person on your team is different and they all have their own sets of values, pet peeves, and motivators. Luckily, leadership is a skill that you can continue to learn and refine along the way. The first step is knowing what qualities make for a good leader.

Let’s check out 8 must-have leadership qualities that every great leader needs to exhibit.

Empathetic

If you are leading people you need to try to understand them and empathize with them. Why are they making the decisions that they are? What could be going on in their lives that is impacting how they perform at work? It is critical that you have an understanding of your team and how they work. Demonstrate empathy and understanding to their situations and challenges. Try to work with them to allow them to bring their full selves to work.

High Integrity

Every leader need to have high integrity. This means a few things. For one, this means holding yourself to the highest ethical standard. Having high integrity also means that you follow through and do what you say you are going to do, always. If you say that you are going to do, make sure that you do it. If you can’t for some reason make sure that the reason is clear and not just an excuse. As a leader, you set the tone and moral compass for the office. You want to make sure that you are setting the bar high.

Passion

The main goal of leadership is to inspire people. You can never do that successfully if you don’t have passion for your people and purpose. Try to make sure that you are very clear on what you are trying to cause. How are you helping people? What role are you playing in your community? Make sure that you reground yourself in this ALL. THE. TIME. You will have bad days that you can quickly lose your passion and enthusiasm. Leadership is hard and sometimes even the best employees can be jerks. Those are the times that you and your team should review your purpose and mission.

Trusting

One of the most important leadership qualities you can exhibit is to be trusting of your team. Only insecure leaders assume the worst in their employees. Instead of looking for what employees are doing wrong, look for what they are doing right. Sure, some employees are awful and they can make it easy for you to assume that all of them are bad. But treating every employee like they are not insanely qualified and honest almost always backfires. Most importantly, you are creating a toxic environment for them and yourself. You are also limiting their potential. They will only meet the expectation that you place upon them. So if you expect that they will be lazy and provide crappy work. Guess what? Eventually they will be lazy and provide crappy work. Give them a reputation to live up to.

Good Communication

As a leader, you need to exhibit good communication skills. You should have concise and clear communication in meetings, email, and over the phone. Nothing takes away from your message like a bunch of typos and spelling errors, so details matter. You should be clear, concise, and paint a vision for your employees. Use language that makes for their background. Don’t talk too rudimentary or too advanced for where they are. If you struggle with public speaking, study some best practices or even take a course online or join a local Toastmasters group.

Decisive

Leaders have to make decisions literally all of the time. Many times they don’t have a lot of information to support their decisions and other times they have too much information to support their decisions. They have to balance the needs of their employees, customers, shareholders, themselves, their community, and on and on. You have to be comfortable making a decision, believing in that decision, communicating that decision (even if it is not going to popular), and even pivot from that decision if need be.

Friendly

Be nice to your employees. Try to get to know a little about them as people and share a bit about yourself. What do they like to do outside of work? Do they have kids? What are their kids names? Do they like to travel? Try to get people to want to do right by you. And that starts by forming rapport. Now, I’m not saying ask employees questions when they are not uncomfortable in sharing. A simple “how was your weekend?” or “any fun plans for the summer?” will work.

You also need to share some information about yourself. It is important they know that you have a life outside of work and you are a person. Share how your weekend went or where you are going on your upcoming vacation. Just remember that employees don’t necessarily need to know every detail about your life. No need to share your Jagerbomb fueled Saturday night debauchery. Keep it friendly, yet professional.

Empowering

As a leader, you need to challenge your employees and empower them to do a great job. Too many insecure managers hold on to authority because they think that they are the only ones that can do something the right way. Unfortunately, so much talent is wasted under this type of leadership. I’ve experienced this in my own leadership journey. When I was pregnant with my first child, I felt awful so I was forced to give up some authority to my team. You know that? They absolutely crushed it. We had our very best year and exceeded so many difficult sales goals. The best part was seeing how much my employees grew and developed during that time. Trust your people to do the work that you are paying them to do and get out of their way.