What do you and others look for in a leader?

What traits do followers look for in a leader?  In their book, Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner list the top 20 traits most often identified by followers when answering that question.  For over 25 years, the authors have been surveying thousands of business and government executives asking the open-ended question, “What values, personal traits, and characteristics do you look for and admire in a leader?”   From these surveys they developed a questionnaire called, “Characteristics of Admired Leaders” which has been administered to over 75,000 people across the world. 

 What is so interesting is that over time and in all the questionnaires four traits have always received over 60 percent of the votes.  And these same four have been consistently ranked in the top four across different countries and one of the four traits has always been ranked the highest each year the survey was completed.

 

Here are the 20 traits on the questionnaire.  See if you can figure out which are the top four vote getters and see how well that match-up with your top four.   I will share the top four in another blog later this week.

 

Intelligent

Fair-minded

Honest

Straight forward

Broad-minded

Supportive

Forward-looking

Dependable

Cooperative

Courageous

Determined

Inspiring

Caring

Competent

Imaginative

Mature

Ambitious

Loyal

Self-controlled

Independent