Leadership

Here Is What Truly Matters to Followers.

Ten critical leadership traits expected and desired by followers

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Purpose and Context

The purpose of this story is to share my leadership experience from the perspectives of followers. Under ten significant headings, I encapsulated a massive amount of research content. My intention aims to simplify the complexity, present it with clarity, and make the content digestible to my readers. The focus is on influential and transformational leaders.

1- Vision and strategy

Vision attracts followers toward their leaders. Followers need to have confidence in a specific vision that is achieved by technical leaders’ essential traits that reinforce a vision and a strategy of leaders to achieve common goals. Leaders’ vision inspires their followers to work for them efficiently and support them wholeheartedly.

Followers characterize leaders’ vision as magic because visionary leaders create new norms and meanings using effective strategies. Leadership in any area requires having an essential vision. Influencing a follower to recognize the magnitude requires a clear vision and effective strategy to sharpen followers’ focus and empower them to work in the same direction.

Vision is a precious mental picture of the leader showing the future. Leaders develop future ideas that will be converted into outcomes of their vision. Articulation of vision and strategy to followers is a critical expectation from leaders.

2- Intelligence, capability, and resourcefulness

Leaders must be mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually intelligent.

The cognitive intelligence of leaders allows them to observe and assess reality. It is not necessarily to score high on an IQ test, but the ability to focus and understand the situations neutrally.

Every situation creates a learning opportunity for these leaders. They learn new cases quickly in the right context. They adjust themselves to the positions based on their capability to learn quickly, respond intelligently, and follow up efficiently.

The emotional intelligence of leaders connecting with their followers effectively remains paramount as the leader and the follower deepen their relationship.

Emotionally intelligent leaders are compassionate and behave authentically. They also depict a growth mindset. Leaders with a growth mindset are more resilient in life, more motivated, can deal with situations more effectively, develop better relationships, communicate more clearly, and hence achieve better results.

The social intelligence of leaders empowers the leader to reach out to a broad audience and enable collaboration.

Socially intelligent leaders act confidently. Some necessary social skills for leaders are listening to others authentically, being emphatic, responding genuinely, sharing thoughts openly, and influencing them to realize their goals.

Influential leaders bring people together to celebrate an occasion, share some past times and have pleasant conversations on points of interest for the followers.

The spiritual intelligence of leaders makes them authentic, charismatic, mindful, and trustworthy. Mindful leaders can cope with massive stress caused by hectic workplaces, volatile business situations, and ever-changing technologies.

A combination of these intelligence types makes the leaders unflappable and inspirational role models. Mindful leaders also develop strong intuitions due to the clarity they generate in their minds.

As mindfulness improves one’s attention, mindful leaders can also be more productive and creative by focusing on the things that matter for their goals and plans.

By using mindfulness, these leaders eliminate distractions and sharpen their cognitive power for essential matters to achieve their aspirations and transformational goals.

Resourceful leaders can understand the current situation, have a vision for the future state, articulate the needs of all stakeholders, and develop a pathway to reach the target state effectively using talented followers.

These four types of intelligence make leaders capable and resourceful.

3- Action, responsibility, and accountability

Successful leaders display action orientation.

Vision, strategy, knowledge, and skills without action do not produce desired outcomes. Action requires priority management.

Influential leaders prioritize tasks and act immediately based on priorities. These leaders don’t delay necessary actions. They fight against procrastination unless an action item in their list has a low value and importance, poses dependencies, or depicts an extended time to complete it.

Setting priorities, switching priorities, and shuffling between priorities are the primary focus of their day-to-day work engagements for themselves and their followers. They ask whether something is essential to do now or can it wait. They take immediate actions to resolve an issue, create a plan, to help the follower. Using this systematic action-oriented approach, nothing important accumulates; hence, they prevent any time management concerns.

They take action using practical tools and processes. Using a quick phone call rather than writing a long email can prove to be effective in acting with concerns of priorities.

Sometimes making multiple phone calls with different stakeholders, and bringing them in the same room with a clear plan for a short time can help resolve complicated matters much more effectively.

In other situations, acting on complicated matters may be met with confusion for the followers. Influential leaders can help followers deconstruct enormous tasks into smaller, manageable components while establishing the priority of each task.

These leaders check the progress actively, encourage followers to keep going with their actions and perform regular follow-ups to ensure the followers succeed.

Transformational leaders are not only action-oriented by themselves, but they also enable their followers to become action-oriented by facilitating the activities, making the approach easier, clearing the hurdles, and providing a clear vision and strategy even in the most challenging times.

Taking personal responsibility and accountability in all walks of life is a virtue for humans. This foundational human attribute is a particular empowering capability for leaders. By taking personal responsibility and being accountable for their situations, leaders can leave better impressions on followers. This cheerful disposition establishes trust in the integrity of the leaders.

As opposed to taking responsibility, complaining about situations, and blaming others and circumstances for undesirable outcomes may create a hostile atmosphere. Blame removes power and replaces it with weakness. Blaming, despite the circumstances, creates an unpleasant situation for followers as no one enjoys taking the blame, even if they are on the wrong side of the fence.

Influential leaders are aware of the implications of blaming and complaining. They take personal responsibility for their actions, emotions, and the results they produce. These leaders also encourage followers to do so.

Followers become more responsive and transparent to responsible leaders. A culture of trust is built between leaders and followers. Followers model their leaders and act with integrity. Because of these empowering benefits of taking personal responsibility, influential leaders can perform better and produce outstanding transformational goals with these culturally transformed followers.

4- Energy, confidence, and self-awareness

Life depends on energy. Our energy is the fuel for us to survive and thrive. Physical, mental, and emotional energy is essential for leaders to shine. They know how to energize themselves at the right dose and right times. Their palpable energy also inspires followers to gain strength and achieve their goals.

Successful leaders exude positive emotions. Their positive emotions, especially passion, enthusiasm, and confidence, are critical success factors to influence their followers.

Energetic leaders are self-aware and distinguishable in all walks of life. Followers respect their confidence and self-awareness. Their passion can influence followers for positive change. Energetic leaders can create a sense of excitement for even the most mundane things in life by showing the exciting aspects stemming from their witty and bright minds.

Self-confident leaders have a positive image of themselves. They also influence other people to be confident in them. They have self-assurance and self-esteem. These terms are all interrelated, reflecting the positive characteristics of leaders.

The energy reflected by these leaders helps followers to see themselves in a more positive atmosphere. The followers can also visualize the future described by energetic leaders. They add energy to future events and conditions in the followers’ minds.

However, the reality shows that most leaders working in complicated environments, face a substantial amount of stress, diminishing or consuming their energy levels very quickly. The busy schedules and ongoing demands from multiple angles wear them out quickly.

Without energy, leaders have the risk of depicting lethargy. Lack of energy is the most undesirable situation for leaders. To this end, leaders need to be mindful to look after themselves and balance their life to gain the required amount of energy to accomplish their goals and create success for their followers.

Rejuvenating and gaining more energy are individual matters. Different people have different kinds of methods dealing with the stress of life. Successful leaders are aware of these challenges, and they look after themselves carefully. They perform this not only for themselves but also for followers. They ensure that life-work balance is maintained in their teams.

5- Transparency, openness, and integrity for trust

Leaders are open, transparent, reliable, trusted, and depict integrity

Trust is essential for human interactions. We only deal with people with trust. If we don’t trust a person, we stay away and keep our distance. No communication occurs when faith does not exist.

Trust opens the doors, but when there is no trust, nothing happens. Leaders build trust with openness and transparency on purpose using interpersonal skills. Their actions demonstrate confidence, and they cautiously refrain from actions that may break the trust.

Vital enablers of trust are integrity, openness, and transparency. Leaders create trust based on these vital enablers. Trust and integrity are fundamental human traits that apply to all walks of life.

Transparency means not having surprises, secret agendas in the relationships, and having clarity of thoughts for all parties. Leaders must be transparent about their beliefs, views, ideas, vision, goals, and objectives. They openly share their plans with followers in an inclusive way.

Openness also includes respecting others’ views and opinions and embracing diversity in a team. They ensure that no one in their teams is discriminated against or distanced based on their age, race, sex, look, and other human traits.

They even encourage opposing views shared with respect. Embracing opposing views on things can be very useful for igniting creativity and innovation. Encouraging people out of the box and rewarding them for the alternatives generally lead to innovation.

6- Modesty, humility, and vulnerability

Leaders must show modesty, humility, and vulnerability because followers don’t like arrogant leaders. They respect modest and humble leaders. Modest leaders take criticism as feedback, and they don’t tend to punish those who criticize them constructively.

Modest leaders admit their mistakes with humility and open vulnerability without self-degrade. They embrace new ideas and don’t resist their views as being superior to their followers. They refrain from dominating the conversations and discussions.

Modesty, humility, and vulnerability attract followers to leaders. Followers feel at ease when they are around modest and humble leaders. They know that their views and opinions can be taken seriously without being judged. Innovative cultures are built on modesty and humility.

Followers find modest leaders charismatic, and they are attracted to them. Followers of humble leaders feel comfortable around them. They open themselves with no fear or concern. They even find it as a therapeutic activity. This friendly and pleasant atmosphere created by modesty has a tremendous effect on productivity and success, especially in attracting diverse views and ideas.

7- Excellence rather than perfection

Excellence refers to having or demonstrating outstanding quality for the leaders to make a noticeable impact on followers of leaders. Excellence comprises the leader’s knowledge, skills, experience, expertise, and personality traits.

Followers expect excellence rather than perfection. Smart followers know that perfection is not possible in this imperfect world. The cost of perfection is prohibitive and undesirable.

Excellent leaders understand that perfection can be a deterrent to excellence. Those who aim for perfection, as a side effect, can face procrastination and unnecessary effort to achieve so-called perfection, which is usually not realistic.

Smart leaders invest 90% of their energy in a feasible solution and discard 10% to reach a difficult perfection level, which has a prohibitive cost. Undoubtedly, no solution can get a 100% consensus when judged by many consumers in this economic climate even though the solution may exceed its goals from multiple angles.

8- Tolerance of Uncertainty

Leaders deal with future outcomes. They make the future.

However, the future is unknown to humans. Outcomes are affected by a myriad of causes beyond the control of people. Hence, uncertainty is a reality to dealing with future events.

Tolerance to uncertainty is a leadership attribute, enabling innovation.

Dealing with uncertainty is a required skill for risk management. Taking calculated risks is a necessity and a fundamental characteristic of successful leaders. Risk and opportunity are inseparable, yin and yang.

Leaders create opportunities by taking risks. They take calculated risks using their logic and intuition and mitigate them to deal with uncertainty in a systematic way. They learn from past failures and use tacit knowledge to mitigate risks.

Dealing with uncertainties creates new options and choices, leading to innovation. Having more options to choose from and linking those options in a creative, intelligent, and integrated way can create new transformational solutions.

Transformational vision, strategy, and goals require tolerance to uncertainty and ambiguity. Successful leaders take risks to create opportunities leading to innovation and transformation outcomes.

9- Inspiration and motivation

Leaders can make followers think in the right direction. They don’t tell them what to do, how to do something, and when to do things, but they inspire and motivate them to think productively using various supportive techniques. Active listening and asking probing questions can help followers think clearly and effectively.

It is a critical skill to make other people think and act. It resembles the proverbial ‘you can force a horse to a river but cannot make him drink’. Inspiring and motivating require psychological knowledge and skillful refinement through years of working with people at various levels. Making other people think and act in the desired direction requires extensive psychological understanding and emotional intelligence.

Leaders know that sometimes small things in life can generate attractiveness for inspiration and motivation. For example, a genuine smile, a simple handshake, calling people by their names, and correctly pronouncing foreign names are a few to mention.

As mentioned in earlier sections, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual intelligence is necessary to inspire other people to think effectively. By paying attention to followers’ current moods, body language, tone of voice, and other clues from their conversations, leaders can steer conversations to healthier and more productive outcomes.

10- Communication, influence, and consensus

Leaders must be effective communicators. Effective communication is an inevitable aspect of leading people, dealing with situations, and setting transformational goals.

Effective communication requires unbiased listening, understanding followers’ points of view, and conveying the message to the point in the right context. Clarity is one of the critical enablers of effective communication. Using the right words properly, and refraining from jargon and ambiguous terms is essential to effective communication.

Leaders articulate the situations; however, they do not just trust the power of their communication. They also find ways to validate the understanding of followers. They follow up on whether the message is understood and appropriate actions are taken and in place.

Leaders focus on influence rather than power to cultivate creativity, and make an impact on goals and desired outcomes. One of the primary influence areas for leaders is related to the self-efficacy of followers. These leaders know that self-efficacy for their followers makes a tremendous impact on the followers’ performance, which can affect productivity positively.

Influence requires several leadership characteristics and capabilities. One of the primary aspects is building trust with followers. Trust is believed to open all communication channels. Followers open and show their authentic selves to trusted leaders.

Establishing the right trust is not easy, and it takes considerable time. Influential leaders focus on creating trust with followers. Personal and professional integrity is critical. Trust and integrity go hand in hand. Lacking integrity decreases and annihilates trust.

The key focus for leaders is reaching a consensus. The consensus is an arrangement bringing all parties to an agreement for discussion of a topic and a problem for resolution. Consensus brings all parties on the same page and creates a win-win situation for all stakeholders.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

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