The Key Characteristic of Leadership

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The Key Characteristic of Leadership - How Do You Get It?

Written by Eric Albertson

To master any characteristics of leadership... do you have to work at it forever or can you actually take a class to learn how to be a leader? What are the key characteristics of leadership and can anyone get them or do you have to be born with them?

At the end of this article, we think you will know the answer to both of these questions.

There Is More Than One Key Characteristic of Leadership

We believe that anyone can become a strong leader. Effective leaders, in our experience, know that the ability to understand themselves and others, communicate effectively, get and keep people in action, and get results consistently comprise some of the key traits of good leaders.

An effective leader understands that if there is one essential characteristic of leadership, it is the ability to help a group set a goal that the group aspires to achieve.

If there is one basic characteristic of leadership in the individual it may simply be the burning desire to provide good leadership because the individual understands the cost of a lack of leadership and sees a personal win in delivering good leadership.

A Key Characteristic of Performance Leadership is Coaching

We also like to talk about something called Performance Leadership. Leadership plus coaching generally equals performance leadership. A leader sets a gap people want to close and then a coach gets and keeps the team in action toward accomplishing the goal. That is performance leadership. Coaching is the key characteristic of performance leadership that distinguishes it from plain leadership.

Obviously, getting called a leader and being a leader are two very different things. We have found that most people cannot distinguish between leadership versus management. Given that state of affairs, it is not surprising that most people who are referred to as leaders do not have any clarity on how to actually provide leadership to their organizations.

Bass' (1989 & 1990) theory of leadership states that there are three basic ways to explain how people become leaders. The first two explain the leadership development for a small number of people. These theories are:

Some personality traits may lead people naturally into leadership roles. This is the Trait Theory.
A crisis or important event may cause a person to rise to the occasion, which brings out extraordinary leadership qualities in an ordinary person. This is the Great Events Theory.
People can choose to become leaders. People can learn leadership skills. This is the Transformational Leadership Theory.

While it is very easy to describe leadership and performance leadership, it usually takes a number of specific skills and lots of self knowledge to do it well and consistently.

Here is a simple inventory of the foundational skills we see as essential to effective performance leadership:

A clear and masterful understanding of the human operating system. This is as simple and complex as understanding what makes people tick.
The Action Paradigm tells us that we manage conversations and not people. If we take the actions that cause the right conversations, the people will manage themselves. Sounds radical until you understand it.
Coaching. Leadership without coaching usually generates results too slowly to be acceptable unless you are just lucky.
Enhanced Communications; this is the key to your communications being heard and acted upon.

What makes a person want to follow a leader?

People and teams follow leaders who create gaps or goals that align with their team's needs, wants, interests, values and desires at some level. People also follow leaders who involve them in the process of setting the goal or gap and who involve them in the strategy and tactics of closing the gap or achieving the goal. Employee involvement and communication are key characteristics of effective leadership.

A Hays study examined over 75 key components of employee satisfaction. They found that:

Trust and confidence in top leadership was the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction in an organization.
Effective communication by leadership in three critical areas was the key to winning organizational trust and confidence:

Helping employees understand the company's overall business strategy.
Helping employees understand how they contribute to achieving key business objectives.
Sharing information with employees on both how the company is doing and how an employee's own division is doing - relative to strategic business objectives.

In one sense both leadership and performance leadership are really pretty simple. Clearly anyone who is committed to the task can provide leadership. Leadership does not demand that you be charismatic, tall, good looking, rich, or any of the other stereotypes out there.

So if it is so simple to be a good or even great leader, why are there so few and what does someone do to become a good or eventually, a great leader?

That brings us back to those "key characteristics of leaders, leadership and performance leadership." From our perspective it is as simple as seeing a worthwhile win and having some clarity about the legion of costs associated with a lack of leadership and performance leadership.

Most people don't change long term unless they can see the win and have some clarity of the costs in allowing the status quo to remain. Another way to say status quo in leadership is to say that the leader allows themselves to default to their natural way of being. That default way of being might be just fine for providing leadership. it usually is not.

"Bad leaders" are generally not "bad people," they are usually just people who have behaviors that have a high cost to leadership and those they are trying to lead. Those behaviors could be changed if the leader wanted to badly enough.

What we see is that almost everyone's default approach to life works well for the bulk of life's demands. At some point leadership demands more. Performance Leadership usually demands more almost immediately. Moving beyond your defaults is always a key characteristic of leadership.

A True Characteristic of Leadership: Keeping Your Word

A person who wants to lead beyond their defaults must decide that they are going to take a stand and behave in ways that do not have such a high cost to their leadership. We find most people, for example, quickly learn that being a more effective leader means that they have to be much more careful about keeping their word.

This sounds easy. In reality, it is one of the most difficult things most leaders have to cope with. Not keeping one's word is a basic human default. Most people think that they do pretty well at keeping their word until they start tracking it. In most cases they are stunned to realize that they actually keep their word less than 50% of the time. The cost to leadership of even failing to keep your word just a little is usually quite high.

Once you understand the issue around keeping your word and the implication on leadership you can decide if you want to do something different than you may have in the past. If you understand the cost and see a clear win, you might change. The ability to keep your word is another key characteristic of leadership.

Characteristics of Leadership Versus Human Defaults

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of basic human defaults that often serve us and our survival quite well. Many of those defaults, however inconsequential they may have been when we were individual contributors, can be tremendously costly when we become leaders. Taking a stand to act against our human defaults in the interest of delivering more effective leadership is often very uncomfortable and difficult.

Providing effective leadership and performance leadership then is really a matter of knowing what to do and then deciding that the win is great enough and the cost of not doing so high enough that you will decide to take a stand to behave differently in the interest of better results. A successful characteristic of leadership then may be the desire to make the changes necessary to provide leadership.

A Pivotal Characteristic of Leadership is to Take Action

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