Leadership Traits IV

Five Most Important Leadership Traits
January 3, 2007

Some people sit and pontificate about whether leaders are made or born. The true leader ignores such arguments and instead concentrates on how to become better at leading people. In this article, we are going to discuss five leadership traits that people look for in a leader. If you are able to increase your skill in these five traits, you will make it easier for people to want to follow you. The less time you have to spend on getting people to follow you, the more time you have to spend refining exactly where you want to go and how to get there.

The five leadership traits are:

Honest
Forward-Looking
Competent
Inspiring
Intelligent
These five characteristics come from Kouzes and Posner’s research into leadership that was done for the book The Leadership Challenge.

Your skill at exhibiting these five traits is strongly correlated with people’s desire to follow your lead. Exhibiting these traits will inspire confidence in your leadership. Not exhibiting these traits or exhibiting the opposite of these traits will decrease your leadership influence with those around you.

It is important to exhibit these traits. Simply possessing each trait is not enough; you have to display it in a way that people notice. People want to see you demonstrating these traits–not just assuming that you have them. It isn’t enough to just be neutral. For example, just because you are not dishonest will not cause people to recognize that you are honest. Just avoiding displays of incompetence won’t inspire the same confidence as truly displaying competence.

The focus of each of these five traits needs to be on what people see you do–not just the things they don’t see you do. Being honest isn’t a matter of not lying–it is taking the extra effort to display honesty.

This Article was retrieved from:
http://www.blogger.com/www.leadership501.com/five-most-important-leadership-traits/

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There are many articles that define or are about leadership traits. I feel it is important to research and learn as much as you can about leaders in order to become a good leader. What do you think?