Leadership Traits
One of the more common ways to study leadership is to look at the traits leaders exhibit and try to determine which ones most contribute to their leadership ability. The authors of The Leadership Challenge took a slightly different approach and studied the traits that people most look for in someone they are willing to follow. The resulting list of traits aren’t necessarily things that will make you a skilled leader, but they are things that will help you attract followers–a very important component of leadership.
The top five traits they identified are:
- Honesty
- Forward-looking
- Inspiring
- Competent
- Intelligent
A leader who is struggling with getting people to follow would be wise to study these traits and look for areas to improve. While actually making an improvement to any of these areas is difficult but achievable goal, most leaders will see a significant gain simply by improving their ability to display these traits. This assumes that they already possess each trait to a degree. Focusing on improving their display of each trait will help attract followers and will usually have a side effect of actually improving their proficiency in each trait simply by giving it more attention.
