Twelve Keys to Successful Leadership

The effectiveness of the leadership within your organization determines to a great extent the degree to which that leadership will succeed. What makes for strong leadership? We all know it when we see it; the trick is to articulate what the key ingredients are. Here are 12 key elements that I believe form the common denominator among successful leaders in any industry. From the lessons on leadership, we know leaders can be developed. These 12 key components to leadership that are demonstrated by effective leaders provide guidelines for developing an environment that fosters the principles and practices critical to organizational success.

1. Your Self-Esteem: As with effective management, the first key is to strengthen your self-esteem. The more value you see within yourself, the greater will be your ability to influence other people.

2. Attitude is the key to organizational performance: A leader needs to have a positive attitude even when things are not going his/her way.

3. Begin with yourself: Successful leadership begins with the individual. Successful leaders share a set of traits or principles, including a high degree of integrity, authenticity, courage, and curiosity. Effective leaders are congruent. They know what they stand for and they have the courage to convey it and the consistency to live it. Their followers can trust them, as they know who they are and what they stand for.

4. Goal Setting; the Path to Your Focus: By setting goals on a routine basis you decide what you want to achieve, and then move step-by-step towards achieving these goals.

5. Commitment: The key to completing goals and subsequently achieving our life’s focus is commitment. Success often starts with the mere existence of the commitment to change and improve. By committing ourselves to accomplishing the goals that we have determined, we take that first step to the achievement of excellence. Commitment is what transforms promises and hopes into reality. This also puts the leader in the position of having integrity – doing what you say you will do.

6. Communication: When you communicate your vision, your mission, and your goals, be clear and concise for all to understand what you want to accomplish. Think before you speak: As a leader, tailor your messages enough for your audience to see a clear picture of the message you are presenting.

7. Listen Well: Listening to what others have to say and their understanding of what you have said. Listen for more than what’s being said; pay attention to what’s not being said and try to spot unspoken expectations that are not clearly communicated verbally or in writing. It’s about picking up on what people are thinking, how they are acting and what they are not necessarily verbalizing. When ideas are fresh and positive, profits and productivity soars. Communicating and listening complement each other for good leaders.

8. Progression of Achievement: Excellence is best achieved in small steps that encompass a greater whole. A productive and reinforcing method of goal setting involves the breaking of any large task (or our overall focus) into manageable segments, with the easiest parts to be accomplished first. By actually achieving success after success, we begin to establish a repetitive pattern of achievement that leads to even greater accomplishment. Success, like failure, tends to be a trend. Continued successes encourage continued successes. Enough successes eventually comprise ultimate excellence.

9. Leaders must walk the talk. Leaders not only make the rules, they follow those rules. This is harder than you think. Take sales, for example. Most business leaders are good salespeople, and good salespeople often break the rules. But you earn your team’s heightened respect when you make a deliberate effort to creatively accomplish your goals without violating or corrupting policies you put into place.

10. Leaders take responsibility for poor performance. In being a leader, you take on the responsibility of accountability. Leaders also understand that most underperforming employees are the product of a poor hiring decision or poor training. Most managers retain underperforming employees too long because they set unrealistic expectations and lack objective ways to evaluate performance. Good leaders understand that retaining an employee under these circumstances works against the employee’s interest as well as the company’s.

11. Motivation: This involves influencing your people to make more long-term efforts in accomplishing goals. It is not the idea of simply giving orders or making suggestions, but the ability to make someone truly want to achieve the desired goals. It starts with motivating yourself and ends with leading the team all going in the same direction.

12. Having a Vision: Leaders know where their organization is headed, and they constantly communicate that vision to their team. If the vision is strong enough, a good leader can delegate its implementation without having to micromanage the details. With this, having the tenacity to stay the course until the established objective is achieved is part of the key of leadership excellence as well.

Taking this one step farther, navigating with this vision is also important to effective leadership and those at the helm who try to lead without a vision are seriously crippled. Organizational members need to know where the organization is going. Without direction, they flounder. To have direction, motivation, and congruence, employees must see the big picture. Employees need a vivid sense of the future that compels them to action. When they are committed to the vision and align it with their personal objectives, a synergy is created that lifts, fuels, and propels them forward.

Successful leaders are willing to take risks with visibility and vulnerability. They demonstrate and build courage through this willingness. Leaders learn to take complete responsibility for their decisions and actions, while sharing credit. Masterful leaders learn, live by, and communicate these principles. They create confidence, respect, and loyalty by operating with integrity and authenticity.

Good leadership is not just the result of hard work. It also stems from having a clear vision of where you want the organization to go. It results from having a solid knowledge of bringing out the best in the people you are leading.