What defines a good leader? Look for these six qualities

WHAT DEFINES A GOOD LEADER? LOOK FOR THESE SIX QUALITIES

Modern business challenges can require new approaches. Leadership will need to evolve in order to continue to guide organisations in tomorrow's world of work. But what are the characteristics of a good modern leader in the workplace - and how can organisations develop them? 

Many studies draw parallels between effective leadership and solid organisational performance. But whether they’re a junior manager or a senior executive, the qualities that leaders need are changing.
 
Nearly 1,500 HR professionals ranked leadership development as the number one priority for 2025, with managers feeling 'overwhelemed' by the expansion of their responsibilities. In today’s unpredictable world, you must combine traditional leadership skills with new abilities. So, what does an effective modern leader look like?
 

1. Remember what makes a good leader

Before looking at the new skills future leaders may need, it is worth reflecting on what a leader actually is.
 
What are the qualities of a good leader? It’s not what you may think.
 
Being in charge of colleagues does not necessarily make you a ‘leader’. Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explains: “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”
 
Retired astronaut Chris Hadfield believes that good leadership is: “Not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it. Especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter.”
 
There may be varying opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of leaders. But overall, most people believe that great leaders motivate their team members to perform their best and achieve common goals.
 
What traits do you need to achieve this in the modern workplace?
 

2. Use blended leadership styles for a VUCA world 

Stacey Philpot from Deloitte Consulting maintains that the core skills needed historically in leadership roles have remained unchanged.
 
“These skills allow someone to become a leader faster than their peers. This is even true in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment,” she says.
 
The core skills for leading in a VUCA environment include:
 
  • Pattern recognition
  • Motivation
  • Agility
  • Emotional intelligence
  • Ability to understand, control and express emotions
 
This represents psychological assessments of 23,000 senior leaders globally over the past 25 years.
 
Consider introducing servant leadership:
 
Leaders need new styles of leadership to deal with changing cultures. Being comfortable with not having the answer and owning failure can create an environment of trust and openness.
 
Collectively, these behaviours form ‘servant leadership’. The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) defines servant leadership as emphasising behaviours and values such as:
 
  • Active listening
  • Empathy
  • Leading by example
 
These are instead of opting for a more authoritative, ‘command-and-control’ leadership style. Leaders create the conditions for team members to excel by displaying vulnerability. But given the stigma around servant leadership, how can organisations encourage it?
 
How to combat stigma surrounding servant leadership:
 
Alsu Polyakova, HR Leader for GE Healthcare, says reducing stigma around servant leadership will take a specific strategy. Most importantly frequent performance appraisals for leaders.
 
“We give leaders lots of opportunities for self-reflection, so they understand how they behave,” she says. GE Healthcare’s most successful leaders help to encourage behavioural change, Polyakova says. The company measures success by how well employees rate leaders on achieving GE Healthcare’s ‘cultural pillars’. These pillars include inspiring trust and empowering employees.
 

3. Create a culture of trust in the workplace

Gaining workers’ trust is more important than ever. One way to build trust is for leaders to take action on issues such as climate change. 71 percent of employees consider their CEOs’ social awareness as critically important, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
 
Social awareness may yield rich rewards. The Edelman poll shows that workers who trust their employers are far more engaged and remain more loyal than their more sceptical peers.
 
Leadership styles are clearly changing. The most effective leaders will need to tailor their styles to suit different scenarios, says Professor Sattar Bawany. “Leaders need a broad repertoire of management styles and the wisdom to know when each style should be used,” he says. “In crisis scenarios like cybersecurity breaches, for example, leadership should be authoritarian because the scenario is unstructured.”
 

4. Adapt your leadership style for different generations

Managers must also balance leadership styles to suit different generations. Modern workplaces will soon house up to five generations under one roof. Therefore, there will be many people with differing preferences on leadership style.
 
As of 2023, millennials are the biggest group in the UK workforce, at 35 percent. Modern leaders must mix old and new leadership styles that meet the needs of younger generations. Doing so will future proof organisations. However, new leadership approaches cannot come at the expense of alienating older workers.
 

5. Commit to lifelong learning

With the workplace evolving so rapidly, leaders cannot rely on past experience alone to get by. Ben Farmer, Head of HR at Amazon UK agrees: “Experience is not always synonymous with wisdom and judgement. And naivety doesn’t always engender novel thinking and openness to change.”
 
Organisations should look for leaders who understand the future as well as those with experience. “Success comes from the ability to combine understanding of exciting, new trends with the experience required to put that knowledge into action,” says Farmer.
 
But what is the right balance? There is no one-size-fits-all approach when balancing experience with adaptability. Achieving the right balance will mostly depend on the organisation and the sector it operates in.
 

6. Be conscious of culture

Organisational culture is an important factor. Risk-averse firms may prefer experience over novel thinking. Leaders may be fearful of a backlash from stakeholders should novel thinking fail. To lower risk, companies should seek leaders who use both scientific evidence and intuition when making decisions.
 
Ultimately, there’s no single blueprint for an effective modern leader. Each organisation must tailor their approach to leadership development. There must be a focus on organisational culture, industry nuances and employee mix.
 
But above all, leaders should recognise that today’s reality may be old news tomorrow.
 
 

For more expert advice, take a look at the following articles: 

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null Common questions about Statement of Work

COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT STATEMENT OF WORK

It’s fair to say that over my 17 years in recruitment I’ve been asked more questions about Statement of Work (SOW) contracts than any other issue or trend related to the world of work.

SOWs have been around for some time, but in the Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) and Contingent Workforce Solutions (MSP) space it seems there is still some confusion about what such a contract actually achieves and if it helps to manage and reduce contingent labour costs.

In this blog I thought I’d share with you the most common SOW questions I’m asked and the answers I give.

What is a SOW?

A SOW is designed to offer flexibility for employers who want to utilise contingent workers with specific expertise to perform a particular task or work on a particular project. These workers are then released once the project or task has been completed. The contract is designed to provide commitment on the outcome or quality the contingent worker will provide.

This has made them very popular with employers, however it comes at a premium cost and some organisations have found that they are paying a higher price for temporaries that have simply been on-hired rather than experts who possess considerable IP and knowledge.

What are the typical client payment structures?

Originally, SOW engagements involved payment only on the satisfactory completion of a particular project or task. Sometimes, for larger volumes of work, milestone payments were made on completion of phases of the overall project.

In more recent times however, SOWs have been used for the engagement of time and materials-based staff augmentation. In other words, the services company is paid for the hours the person worked rather than the outcomes achieved. In this case, the employer typically pays a daily rate and there is no transparency on the margin charged and no specific deliverable outcome.

So does this mean the contingent worker I’d be hiring isn’t a permanent employee of the service company or recruiter? Does that matter?

Originally, SOW services were provided by a professional services or IT services company that employed a permanent team of experts who were trained in specific methodologies and systems and had the support of a team of permanent colleagues to help solve complex problems for clients.

As mentioned, these services companies employed a permanent workforce, paying their salary even when they were not working on a billable assignment.

However, more recently, and in the IT sector in particular, a number of large recruitment agencies have begun to provide contractors for SOW contracts. As these people are contractors, they do not have the support of a team of permanent colleagues behind them and are paid for the hours worked on an assignment rather than a specific outcome.

So while you may think you’re engaging someone who is a permanent employee of the supplier, with a known history and specific training and support provided by the supplier, what you’re really getting is a contractor who the supplier could have only had on their books for a short period of time.

In addition, the supplier is also able to provide such contractors on a rate card basis where margins are unrestricted. To put this in context, an IT recruitment agency can make two to three times the margin by supplying a contractor to a client this way rather than through the client’s preferred supplier agreement.

Some of the specialist IT services organisations also hire contractors and provide them to their end clients under these types of agreements.

This means you might be paying a much higher margin for a person you could just as easily have hired from a recruitment agency on a temporary assignment at a third or less of the margin cost.

So people who are effectively a timesheet contractor rather than employed directly by the service provider have no responsibility to complete particular work of a particular quality?

No. Contractors who are supplied or engaged on a SOW agreement but are paid on a day rate basis typically come with no defined deliverable and no requirement to rectify mistakes at their own cost.

What’s the best way to attract the best contingent talent available?

In my experience, contingent workers’ main two areas of concern are being paid reliably and on time, and arranging a new contract that commences promptly following the completion of their current one.

That’s why we suggest employers engage contingent workers through a supplier who pays regularly and on time, ideally weekly.

On a longer assignment, we also advise employers to discuss with the worker when they would like to take some leave. Many contractors are reluctant to ask for leave while in a contract and they appreciate being offered the chance to take a short break. This can include telling contractors in advance if a stand-down period is planned, for example over the end of year, so they can plan around that.

It seems like a lot of work to implement a contingent workforce model that could manage our SOW – if we do decide to do so, how can we get it across the line?

At Hays Talent Solutions our Implementation Director has been doing this for 11 years across Europe, Asia and ANZ, and is supported by a team of 15 subject matter experts. It is a highly complex change management project, and it really pays to utilise people with a lot of experience in delivering successful outcomes in this area.

Key tips include ensuring that you establish a robust project board, a dedicated implementation project manager and a dedicated change manager to oversee the implementation from your side, with realistic timeframe expectations.

AUTHOR


Shane Little
Managing Director APAC, Hays Talent Solutions
As Managing Director for APAC at Hays Talent Solutions, Shane is responsible for the delivery of market leading Talent Solutions to a range of clients across Australia, New Zealand and Asia. He has a unique insight into total talent management, talent acquisition and contingent workforce programs having been involved in early stage PSL arrangements, first generation programmes and mature workforce solutions.