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The Five Qualities of Successful Leaders

What makes a leader successful?

There are many lists. Sometimes the lists go as high as 100 qualities. Sometimes they are fewer competencies but still too many to remember and too many to clearly assess on a personal basis. It's part of the difficulty of taking a 360 evaluation and making sense of it.






I like Adam Bryant's approach of focusing on five key leadership traits. We can quibble about which five leadership traits matter the most, but this is a workable list.







My own work has also identified five leadership traits that I believe clearly shows the strengths needed and how great leaders use their flexibility (or centeredness) to optimize their use of those strengths, even though we each vary in which strengths we use the most.

It is built on the work of centuries of personality sorters and bears similarities to several prominent ones which focus on four traits.

I see these four strengths as Clarity, Courage, Creativity and Compassion. The fifth strength is Centeredness, showing the flexibility and balance to utilize all of the strengths as needed in order to achieve noble goals.

Using all five strengths enables a leader to take care of people while also achieving excellent results.


Here's a link to Bryant's article, well worth the read:

The Corner Office, Adam Bryant On The Five Qualities of Successful Leaders

The charts compare Bryant's ideas (I created the chart so he might not totally agree with how they compare, but I present them here for your reflection) to the Front Range Leadership approach of Centered Leadership. See what you think. It's worth talking about. Maybe you can compare Centered Leadership to other leadership strength sorters. The point is this: centered, high performance leaders use a variety of strengths with flexibility and purpose. Leave any of these out and the leader is at the mercy of someone who is strong in the area ignored.

Which strength are you working on today?

-- Douglas Brent Smith

To learn more about Centered Leadership strengths, explore our workshop: Supervising for Success.



  
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Comments

  1. Jason HarperFebruary 4, 2020 at 12:55 AM

    There are many qualities of a leader but the leadership skills can be boosted by the company by conducting employee training programs for development of leadership skill set.

    ReplyDelete

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