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 Director Digest: Shane Little, Regional Managing Director APAC - Part 1

DIRECTOR DIGEST: SHANE LITTLE, REGIONAL MANAGING DIRECTOR APAC - PART 1

People power our success.

And we’re fortunate to have some of the very best leading our operations across the globe, showcasing innovation, creativity and a real passion for solving the problems our clients face when it comes to sourcing, attracting and retaining top talent.

Their experience and insights are fundamental to Hays and sharing this vision enables us all to deliver the tools, technology and insights that will inform your workforce strategy.

Which is why we’re introducing a new series, ‘Director Digest’. In the first installment, Shane Little, Managing Director for the APAC (Australia, New Zealand and Asia) regions, offers an insight into the challenges and opportunities encountered as we offer workforce solutions across the world’s largest continent.

 

Unique markets, unique opportunities

I’m fortunate to oversee our operations across Australia, New Zealand and Asia. While they are grouped together in name, it is the diversity of these markets that makes my job so rewarding – and at times, challenging.

If you look to Asia, for example, we have a presence in seven countries across the continent, and the maturity of those marketplaces ranges dramatically between Hong Kong and India as an example.

When you talk to customers, they want different things. They use different languages and have differing cultural nuances that surround how they purchase goods and services.

Prior to my first ever meeting with a customer in Japan, for example, I undertook training that covered where to stand, where to sit, how to hand over a business card and how to greet people. The challenge is to understand and embrace cultural diversity.

This offers an opportunity to build better teams, ones that reflect the communities in which we operate.

That isn’t to say that the value of international mobility isn’t still paramount. It absolutely is. Some of our most successful businesses across Asia have been established and run by people who started their Hays careers in other parts of the world – and having a global talent pool from which to form teams is important.

But in Asia in particular, we talk about sustainable leadership. This is about leaving a leadership footprint and DNA for the medium to long term that represents the countries, regions, territories and localities that we live and operate in.

The heart of the Hays culture rings true, whether you’re in Hong Kong, Sydney or Christchurch. That passion for people and the desire to deliver a service that changes lives remains consistent. But the look and feel of those teams will be different – and that is key to diversity and inclusion. It’s not about having the ‘same face’ for our business all around the world.

 

A growing gig economy?

77% of executives believe that freelance and gig workers will substantially replace full time employees within the next five years.

When you reflect on the APAC region, the story is a little different.

I co-presented at a contingent workforce conference in Sydney nearly 6 years ago. There was a lot of talk at that stage about 50% of the Australian workforce being non-permanent within five years.

While the appetite to engage labour in a different way does exist in places like Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, the regulatory framework has not been able to keep pace with the desire to enable a more mobile and agile workforce.

The result is that people are still viewing work on a non-permanent basis as a less attractive path to follow because you aren’t afforded the same level of stability and security.

If you step into some of the less developed workforce models in Asia, such as India or China, being employed on a permanent basis brings with it a much higher level of kudos. Often, people operating in the gig economy are viewed as second-class employees.

So while there is plenty of anecdotal feedback and evidence, I personally don’t see the contingent workforce accelerating at the same levels that we have been talking about for the past three or four years.

 

The implications of restricted movement

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit a few years ago, Asia, New Zealand and Australia implemented some of the toughest restrictions on movement.

The impact on sourcing and attracting talent has been enormous.

I’ve worked in the Talent Acquisition and Recruitment industry in Australia since 2004 and have experienced a variety of economic cycles, including the Global Financial Crisis. However, I think the last 12 months has been – and continues to be – the most candidate short environment that Australia and New Zealand, in particular, have ever operated in.

When Australia began to reopen from a retail perspective, for example, you would frequently see a bar or restaurant forced to close for the weekend because it had no staff. The level of access to international students and the back-packer population who fulfil these jobs was too limited.

Similarly, when looking at digital industries such as development or cyber-security, Australia and New Zealand have traditionally relied on locations such as India from which to source talent. With the onset of the pandemic, these pools were effectively closed off.

The good news is that with the reopening of borders, you’re already beginning to see the ‘trickle effect’. A few months in, the trickle of international students and travelers has become a steady flow, not just of students but also of qualified migrant workers eager to secure sponsorship.

It will take time to regain momentum, but it’s a great thing for countries to have culturally diverse workforces – it's good for education, good for the advancement of how we get work done and it’s good for people.

Of course, the pandemic has exposed how fragile some systems are, and we need to question what that means for the Talent Acquisition industry, as well as Hays more specifically.

It will require us to be more creative than ever before in terms of utilising local and domestic sourcing channels, and our team will need to be ‘slicker’ in the ways we manage our application funnels, forcing us to focus closely on the candidate experience.

 

The conversation continues

There is so much more that could – and must – be said about these regions, and the role that an agile workforce strategy will play in ensuring organisations have the talent they need to drive forward their ambitions in 2022, and beyond.

In Part 2, I’ll dive a little deeper into the implications of instilling a culture of wellbeing and inclusion across these countries, as well as reflecting on the agility required from organisations in order to thrive in the new world of work.

 

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.

 

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