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 Five things to remember when recruiting technology talent

FIVE THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN RECRUITING TECHNOLOGY TALENT

Five things to remember when recruiting technology talent

COVID-19 has driven demand for digital and technology talent globally in 2020. Here’s how businesses can stand out in a competitive market.

Demand for technology talent has evolved rapidly since the start of the pandemic.

At first, there was a hugely increased demand for candidates that could enable remote working – people with cloud-based skills that could deploy systems like AWS and Azure. Within the first four to eight weeks of lockdown happening, demand for these candidates rose by 400 per cent.

That quickly changed to interest in cybersecurity candidates. While technical skills were sought in these candidates, businesses also needed people who could drive behavioural change in users. When employees are working from home, there are different vulnerabilities compared to working in an office environment. Organisations needed candidates who could ensure employees were operating in a secure environment with the quick deployment of new systems.

Next, we saw an uplift in demand for data analysts and data scientists, particularly in the UK. There was demand from central governments and health services for people who could crunch the numbers around COVID–19 and take a predictive view of what would come next.

There was also some private demand for these candidates, with businesses trying to understand how their risk profile might have changed.

Those trends were seen between March and May, but we’re now seeing companies think longer-term about their digital and technology talent strategy. Here are five of the key areas organisations will need to consider when recruiting technology talent:

1. Planning further into the future is key

After the first months, where companies were playing catch-up, businesses were starting to look ahead. They understand that COVID-19 is going to be here for some time and, rather than just reacting to the immediate crisis, organisations have started planning for the future. From May to June, there was a drop off in demand as they considered what their next steps were going to be.

Lots of companies, from large enterprises to public sector organisations, had digital transformation programmes in place, but they needed to identify new priorities based on the new needs of employees and customers, whether they were individual consumers or businesses. Many found they had room for improvement when it came to the tools they used to engage people. There was also a need to improve virtual shop windows, websites, and anything else businesses had to facilitate their direct relationship with the customer, which will have replaced or augmented traditional human interaction.

We found these forward-looking businesses were coming to us with a planned approach. They had identified their programme of work and the types of people they would need to enable change and transformation. Most organisations now work in an agile or a semi-agile way, so they are looking for skills that can enable the change, but also software developers that can build and develop the applications that they require.

2. Recruitment processes need to keep evolving

To be successful in their hiring in this highly competitive market, businesses have had to evolve their processes quickly. Most companies had some sort of video platform, but adoption was poor, generally speaking. COVID-19 made it a necessity because everyone was working remotely, so you had that accelerated transformation, which increased adoption very quickly.

The next challenge was around onboarding. Many companies don’t have a cohesive remote onboarding process where they can bring somebody into a business in a non-physical way. Luckily, technology companies, or technology departments, move in quite an agile way, they are almost always the early adopters of these changes. They’re familiar with the technology and they’re advocates of it. On the whole, though, COVID-19 has accelerated cultural change in non-native digital organisations.

3. It’s worth searching outside of your usual talent pools

Organisations have become much more flexible in the geographies they will hire from. We have helped a company in Belfast recently that was willing to look for candidates within three time zones. They are tapping into a much broader pool of talent. We’re starting to see this trend more frequently.

What remains to be seen is what will happen over the next six to 18 months, and whether this has become the norm or if these placements are outliers within the market. My instincts tell me that, in tech, we’re going to see an awful lot more talent placed that is not linked to the geography of the office that they’re ‘based in’.

4. There has been a cultural shift around technology adoption

A lot of the time, when technology workers try to launch new systems in organisations, the process change is difficult and people won’t take it on quickly. People have been forced to adopt new technology rapidly and that’s changed a lot of people’s view of it forever. The pandemic has been the biggest change that’s happened in the business world in our lifetimes, and collectively we’ve demonstrated that in a matter of weeks, most organisations have been able to pivot from working in an office to a fully remote working environment. Behaviourally, users have demonstrated they are able to make this rapid change, so psychologically they will be more open to new systems in the future.

5. Organisations will need to take time to reflect

Organisations have moved quickly and will want to go back and revisit what they did earlier in 2020 to make sure it’s robust. They are looking at a new hybrid world where employees work both from home and in the office. Strategically, they must make sure that they are in a position where they can continue to operate and thrive.

This move to hybrid working is likely to mean an acceleration in digital transformation and that means that technology professionals with legacy skillsets will need to retrain to make sure that they have the skills required in this new world.

Finally, all organisations need to consider what this means for new entrants to the workforce. A large part of learning how to be effective in the world of work comes from observation, being mentored and getting real-time feedback. Organisations that have shifted to a remote model will need to consider how to manage this.



AUTHOR

James Milligan
Global Head of Technology
James Milligan is the Global Head of Technology at Hays, having joined in 2000. In his role, he is responsible for the strategic development of Hays ‘ technology businesses globally.