Leadership has never been so challenging and often it feels like you are fighting to understand what are the traits of the best leaders and leadership.
Here are the 26 leadership traits you want to have, work on and develop within your teams.
A – Attitude
How do you handle attitude and how your attitude is perceived within the business?
B – Balance
How much balance do you have and what work/life balance are you and your business offering?
C- Company Culture
How seriously are you taking, designing and improving the company culture within your business? Does the team know the principles that make up your company culture? If something goes wrong does your company culture bounce back or are fingers pointed by individuals?
D – Delegation
How do you delegate and how well are you supporting those you delegate to?
E – Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
How emotionally smart are you? How are you promoting EQ as well as IQ and how do you reward those who apply EQ to their management styles and throughout the business?
F – Formidable
How formidable are you and your business? Is this something you work on? How formidable can you be to influence your competitors?
G – Growth Mindset
Do you have a growth mindset? Are you ensuring there is personal and professional growth throughout your organisation? Do you encourage growth?
H – Hybrid
How are you approaching hybrid work and enabling hybrid work to thrive within your business?
I – Intelligence
Do you show intelligence? Do you offer to share your intelligence and do you understand that IQ only works with EQ and PQ (political intelligence)?
J – Jobs To Be Done
Do you prioritise the right jobs to help your customers become successful? Do you understand how to build the right jobs to be done mindset?
K – Kind
Are you kind to those around you? Do you build out kindness and respect within your business?
L – Learning
Are you always learning? Do you consider how you learn from failure and teach from these moments?
M – Mental Strength
Do you have the right mental strength and allow those around you to demonstrate their mental toughness and their exercise their mental strength?
N – North Star
Do you know what makes your company ultimately successful? Have you set the right north star? Does the company have the right compass to be successful? Do you repeat the north star as often as possible? Does your strategy roll up to your north star?
O – Operational Excellence
Do you understand what operational excellence looks like? Can you explain what “excellent” looks like across your organisation and how are you teaching excellence daily?
P – Prioritisation
Are you prioritising the right work? Prioritising the right hiring? Prioritising the right spending? Ultimately are you creating focus?
Q – Quality Of Work
Do you know what good work looks like internally? Do you proactively reward high-quality work? Do you reward good quality work overwork just hitting deadlines?
R – Relationships
Are you building relationships across the business, vertical and ensuring you keep relationships strong?
S – Security
Are you offering security to your teams? Are you secure with your operations?
T – Trust
Do your team trust you? Do you show you trust your team? Do you ensure trust is earned and rewarded?
U – Unity
Is your business showing unity? Do you operate as one unit versus numerous teams within departments?
V – Vision
Do you have vision? Are you painting the right vision for your company to follow and believe in? When people lose their way, does your vision set them back on the right path?
W – Wellness
Are you putting your wellness and wellbeing first? Do you support mental wellness and have you put in the right support levels to ensure wellness is a priority?
X – X-Factor
Do you have the x-factor? Do your team(s) strive for the x-factor?
Y – Yare (Speed and agility)
Does your teamwork with yare? Do they know that speed and agility are vitally important alongside just hitting deadlines?
Z – Z-A Starting At The End
Can you start at the end and ensure you and the team lay out the steps to be successful? Ensuring you know what success is and the milestones to hit?
Want weekly help?
Subscribe to our weekly leadership newsletter.
Essential Reading
Need a glossary of some of these terms? The focus glossary will help