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 How to Facilitate Upskilling and Reskilling in the Life Sciences Industry

How to Facilitate Upskilling and Reskilling in the Life Sciences Industry

The Life Sciences 2030 Skills Strategy report states that the Life Sciences sector will create around 133,00 jobs over the next 10 year in the UK alone. The industry is growing, and so is the need for skilled workers. As digitalisation and new innovations continue to transform the health sector, the demand for professionals who can successfully navigate emerging macrotrends, such as TechMed, teleconsultations, remote health monitoring and new ATMPs, is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The talent supply is not keeping pace with the demand.
 
Learning and upskilling can play a key role in addressing this issue. But are employers and employees on the same page when it comes to learning? To gather insights, we segmented the results of the survey behind our global Learning Mindset report to include only the responses from Life Sciences and Pharma employers and employees in EMEA. What we uncovered is a startling disconnect between the two groups.
 
In this blog, we use the results to explore the importance of upskilling the current Life Sciences workforce, and how building learning strategies into personal and organisational plans can bridge the learning disconnect and address skills shortages.
 
 

The disconnect between employers and employees

 
According to the survey results, 80% of Life Sciences employees expressed a strong willingness to acquire new skills. However, only 43% of employers believed their employees were equally open to learning. This difference in perception indicates a gap in communication or lack of understanding between employers and employees regarding their attitudes towards acquiring and developing skills.
 
We found that Life Sciences employees and employers also disagree on whether the resources for enabling the learning process are actually available to professionals. When asked if workplaces provided learning resources, only 52% of employees said yes, while 78% of employers claimed they did offer learning resources. We are therefore faced with a clear disconnect in communication.
 
Lastly, we discovered that, when resources are available, employees are not satisfied with them. Just 53% of workers agree that the learning resources provided will suit their preferred method of learning, compared with 61% of employers. It's alarming that almost half of professionals don't feel the current resources meet their needs.
 
The data is conclusive. Employers and employees in the Life Sciences industry do not concur on learning, even though it’s crucial for overcoming the challenges of tomorrow. But how can you remedy this disconnect in your organisation and facilitate the upskilling and reskilling of your workforce? The data suggests most of your workers will be keen to upskill if the means are there for them to do so. Let’s look at how we can make that happen.
 
 

Fostering a learning culture in the Life Sciences industry

 
Companies must create a work culture that enables the acquisition of skills by employees actively responding to their willingness to learn. This can be achieved through initiatives such as training programs, mentorship opportunities, and regular performance reviews, in which employees can discuss their career aspirations and desired skill sets.
 
Counting on a resourceful and informed workforce is also a top-priority for European-wide institutions that are enabling large-scale initiatives to foster learning acquisition in the Life Sciences sector. The aim is to implement a series of programmes through the Pact for Skills at local, regional and national levels.
 
One of the most outstanding plans is the BeWell project (2022-2026) backed by the EU and EIT Health, a collective of top-notch healthcare stakeholders. The project assists with the development, implementation, and scaling of a plan for upskilling and reskilling European healthcare workers. The programme is mainly committed to the transfer of knowledge in medical settings, the promotion of digital literacy and soft skills, and the development of lifelong learning.
 
Let’s now review one of the most successful practices that employers in the healthcare sector are successfully implementing today.
 
 

Reverse mentoring: effective training of diverse Life Sciences employees

 
Reverse mentoring is cross-generational training in which more senior employees are coached on the use of new technologies and the way younger talent operates while those new on the career ladder gain insights into core business strategies and how the company works from the top down. Reverse mentoring presents a significant cultural shift in talent management, but the advantages it brings to an organisation are evident. It cultivates business resilience, enhances reputation, and mitigates employee retention problems by fostering collaboration among different generations of employees.
 
Roche successfully implemented a reverse mentoring programme for which both mentors and mentees said it helped them eliminate bias and preconceived ideas about each other’s generations. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) conducted a study of clinicians in practice that showed both mentors and mentees could make their voices heard and did not view social distinctions in a hierarchical way during their reverse mentorship programme. Particularly for doctors, the long-established medical hierarchy hinders the ability of juniors to speak up when witnessing errors and thus prevents patient harm.
 
 

A plan to facilitate upskilling and reskilling in your company

 
Now that we’ve covered the current landscape in the Life Sciences industry and the actions major companies and institutions are taking to solve the talent gap, let’s explore how learning can, and should be, at the core of your strategy.
 
 
1. Build learning strategies into your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
 
Going back to our survey results, 68% of employees in the Life Sciences definitely believe they need digital skills to succeed in their roles and 70% of employers agree. The stats prove workers know they need to update their skills. By building learning strategies into their EVP, employers demonstrate their commitment to fostering a culture of growth and development within the organisation. This sends a powerful message to both current and prospective employees that the company values their professional growth and is willing to invest in their learning journey.
 
 
2. Engage with your employees to provide useful learning resources
 
74% of employees said that they themselves are most responsible for upskilling, which means they don’t see their employers actively engaging in their learning acquisition process. It is imperative that you communicate with your workers to build learning into their career paths and ensure the resources you’re providing suit their needs. Particularly in the Life Sciences sector, our research found employees prefer structured, in-person learning with testing. Perhaps this has to do with their academic background. It’s also important that both employees and employers recognise on-the-job training as learning. Only 7% of employees and 5% of employers see on-the-job training as effective. This is where mentorships can become a powerful tool to foster cross-generational collaboration and upskilling.
 
 
3.Utilise Learning Management Systems (LMS) LMS
 
can help you streamline the upskilling and reskilling process by centralising learning materials to ensure easy access to up-to-date information while tracking and managing employee progress. These platforms are also excellent tools to create personalised learning paths to cater for the individual needs of workers. In the Life Sciences sector, LMS can secure compliance with regulatory bodies and help you meet mandatory personnel training requirements. A system that can captivate users and smoothly integrates into their schedules is fundamental to high adoption.
 
 

Today's remedies for tomorrow's challenges

 
Addressing skill shortages in the Life Sciences industry requires a collaborative effort between employers and employees. The disconnect between the two groups in terms of available resources and desired learning methods needs to be bridged. Creating a work culture that encourages learning and communication is essential, as demonstrated by successful initiatives like reverse mentoring. By investing in learning and development, you can have a competitive advantage in an industry expected to be worth globally USD 47.5 billion by 2027.
 
Get in touch to discuss how we can support you to secure the skills you need and build a workforce strategy fit for today’s challenges as well as tomorrow’s.

 

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