When you’re hiring a new employee, you want to make sure they are good leaders. Whether or not they’ll be in a leadership position, employees who can lead provide value to your business because they can help others, show initiative, and set an example.
Leadership skills can be taught, which means having just one good leader in your company can be good for the entire business. People can obtain good leadership skills through teaching and learning over time. Here are the most valuable characteristics of a good leader.
Communication
Good leaders have great communication skills. After all, being a leader means that you’ll need to communicate with a team. Communication goes far beyond using works to get your point across. Leaders know how to communicate effectively and how to change communication from one coworker to the next.
The most important aspect of good communication is listening, not talking. Good leaders communicate well by listening and paying attention to their teams. As a leader, you need to make sure your entire team has a voice and feels cared for and heard. Treating your team poorly will result in poor work performance, but making them feel valued can positively impact the work of everyone on the team.
Work Ethic
If you want to make sure that your project manager is a good leader, take a look at their work ethic. According to ShareAble for Hires, work ethic is a quality of a good employee, not just a good leader. Those with a good work ethic know where to draw the line between work and play. They know when to get work done and when to go home and focus on other things.
People who have a good work ethic are typically more productive. Not only that, but they can set an example for the entire office with their work ethic. When other employees see someone with a good work ethic, they’ll notice how much they get done and how much praise they get. In addition, by seeing how well this person performs, the other employees are more likely to stop scrolling social media and improve their own work ethic.
Integrity
Integrity means doing the right thing no matter what. Without integrity, there is no possibility of success. You can’t expect someone’s team to be honest when the leader lacks integrity.
Honest leads succeed by sticking to their word and lead by example. People with integrity usually:
- Admit when they’ve made mistakes and apologize for them
- Highlight the work of their employees
- Give the benefit of the doubt
- Are appreciative of other people’s time
Another aspect of integrity is being trustworthy. While your team members might not be sharing their deepest darkest secrets with you, they may want to confide in you from time to time about situations that involve work. For example, if they’re being bullied, they may come to their manager for help on how to handle the situation. A good leader will not share this information with anyone else.
Accountability
When someone makes a mistake, you want them to be accountable for it. When the entire team makes a mistake, it’s up to the leader to accept responsibility because they were in charge of the team. Instead of trying to blame everyone else, the leader becomes the accountable one to fix his or her mistakes.
Whether the team has a strong win or makes a terrible mistake, the leader is accountable for the results. A good leader holds themselves and others accountable for their actions, which can create a sense of responsibility.
Not only that, but great leaders give credit where credit is due and will take the blame when necessary.
Humility
Some people simply enjoy having power, so when they’re given a leadership opportunity, they can become quite full of themselves rather than putting in the work to become a good leader. Good leadership focuses on team dynamics more than self-promotion. A good leader isn’t someone who is more concerned with themselves than the well-being of the team.
At the same time, those with humility are the first ones to admit their mistakes. If the team gets blamed for something, a leader who doesn’t have humility will try to blame their team or single out a member, which can create an uncomfortable work situation.
However, a good leader with humility knows when they’ve made a mistake that reflects the entire team. At the end of the day, it’s the team leader’s responsibility to make sure that their team meets all goals.
Positivity
Leaders need to be able to inspire their teams. As a leader, the rest of the team looks to this individual on how to act and feel about certain work situations. Employees typically start to exhibit the behaviour of their managers, so leaders need to lead by example and stay positive so that their employees will mirror them.
Oftentimes employees will start to act like their coworkers, whether or not they are a team leader. If one employee starts to voice how miserable they are, then another one will become miserable. One negative person can spoil the entire office, so the leader must have the ability to inspire others to be positive.
Influence
Good leaders should have the ability to influence others. We don’t mean influence as in manipulate. Being manipulative means that you’re likely a bad leader. Influence means the ability to make others glad to do their work and make those individuals want to be better. How a team leader acts can impact their entire team, so they must be a positive influence rather than a negative one.
A team manager who speaks negatively about people in the company and/or the company itself will influence its team members to do the same, which can make doing projects together unbearable.
Final Thoughts
Finding employees who can lead can be difficult, especially when you don’t know how well someone will do unless they’ve been in a prior leadership position. Look for the above traits when trying to decide whether or not an employee should be put in a leadership position.
Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys San Diego life, travelling, and music.