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The top four traits followers look for in their leader.

On my previous blog, I challenged you to pick from the list of traits the perennial top four that the majority of followers seek in a leader.  How well did you do in picking them?  Here they are in rank order:

1. Honest
2. Forward looking
3. Inspiring
4. Competent

 I am not surprised, and I hope you aren’t either, that honesty always ranks as the number one trait by far each time the survey is completed.  If you are leader, how well would your employees and peers say you live out these four key traits?

 

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

The Keys To Managing Expectations

As a leader, I learned the hard way that misaligned and unclear expectations can quickly lead to confusion, conflict, and communication problems.  This is true particularly at the beginning of a new working relationship, when developing annual performance objectives, and when initiating major work projects.  It is the leader’s responsibility to ensure that expectations are clearly defined, completely understood and agreed to, and continually maintained.  Unfortunately, many leaders make the mistake of assuming that their expectations are understood when in fact they aren’t for numerous reasons.  On the leader’s part, some of the reasons for misalignment include:  the expectations weren’t adequately defined; the expectations weren’t clearly communicated; or the expectations may have changed.  On the other hand, the follower may have misunderstood the expectations, or believed they were unrealistic, or disagreed with some or all of them.  When any of these occur, either on the part of the leader or the follower, there is a breakdown in trust, reduction in effectiveness, and potential for greater problems.  How does the leader avoid these problematic issues with their followers and ensure they are aligned around a common set of expectations?  It is really quite simple and it comes down to good two-way communications.  The leader must:

 

1. Clearly define their expectations in writing, give a copy of them to the follower, and then jointly discuss them in detail.

 

2. Ask the follower to develop his or own written list of expectations of the leader (or project or performance objectives), give them to the leader, and discuss them in detail as well.  Remember, where there is no involvement, there is no ownership.

 

3. Quickly resolve and reconcile differences in expectations if they exist.  I find that in most cases, the differences are minor and often a result of misunderstandings or incorrect assumptions that are quickly corrected when candidly and honestly discussed by the leader and follower.  However, it must be a two way dialogue usually with some give and take required by both individuals.

 

There may be occasions when a follower believes he or she can’t meet the leader’s expectations.  Many times these concerns can be rectified for by the leader through providing the follower with additional training/development and/or creating quick wins to increase their level of confidence.  However, if the follower won’t agree to the expectations, the leader will either have to lower their expectations (this rarely happens) or work with the follower to find him or her a more appropriate position or project.  If you’re a leader, have you fully communicated your expectations to your followers?

 

Learning As A Way Of Life

People are bombarded with a constant steam of information today: emails, twitters, media, text messages, and many more.  It's getting hard to find time to do anything and to separate the important from the unimportant.  However, I'm firmly convinced a leader needs to stay current on emerging trends, new technologies, market dynamics, and many more factors daily impacting our lives and our businesses.  To be efficient and effective in managing our information flows, we need to learn to work smarter and use technology to our advantage.  One good example is in reading books.  I'm convinced leaders have to be readers.  Yet, there are hundreds of good business and personal development books published every year.  How, does one stay on top of all this important information.  I've found, as have many of my colleagues, that using a book service is a huge help.  There are a number of good services out there that read the latest books and provide you with an email summary of the books in various formats including PDF, PDA, HTML, and audio.  The summaries are brief, concise, and hit the key take-aways from the book - and it only takes about 10 minutes to read the summary.  For several years, I've used Business Summaries and I highly recommend them.  It's the quickest and most cost effective method I know to stay current - keep on learning.