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 secure business engagement and ROI when procuring HR services

HOW TO SECURE BUSINESS ENGAGEMENT AND ROI WHEN PROCURING HR SERVICES

No business function operates in a silo, and procurement is no exception. It’s not news that internal relationships are key to delivering strategic and savings objectives, but still many procurement professionals find it tricky to know where to start, particularly when it’s the first time an organisation has explored a particular procurement solution. 

Following review of recent tender exercises, we launched our HR Services Procurement Best Practice Survey to benchmark the different approaches to procuring these services, so we could better understand how to meet the challenges our customers were looking to address. 

As a provider of outsourced recruitment services our survey has helped us establish the capability and importance benchmarks for the key stages in the procurement of outsourced recruitment services. This allows us to engage more fully with buyers and end users to share these findings and apply the learns to improve the design and procurement of our services, so that together we can maximise value for money and deliver an enhanced level of business benefit that drives ROI faster. 

In this blog, and others to follow, I'll be covering key observations from these benchmarks. The survey explored levels of business engagement from the outset, as I see this as key to defining what success looks like in terms of the key dimensions of cost, quality, efficiency and risk.

Enlisting a range of perspectives from the outset avoids barriers later on

Possibly the biggest single mistake that I’ve seen when organisations are considering an MSP programme is not fully understanding the different needs, and current state of resourcing, across the diverse set of stakeholders who will be receiving the services once they go live. To overcome this Hays have developed a consulting toolkit, which explores the needs, wants and priorities across the business. We then consider a phased approach to meeting everyone’s needs. Failing to complete this stage often results in a generic specification that doesn’t address the niche requirements for more complex areas, and creates avoidable barriers late on in the adoption of services.

Analysing your spend data is still the best way to estimate spend and usage

Often the key challenge for procurement professionals looking to enter into a MSP service for the first time with an organisation is understanding the key spend, and population size of the non-permanent workforce. After all, if getting data was easy then the controls that an MSP enables may be required. You’ll require access to operational as well as spend data and this exercise often involves painstaking analysis of spend reports using the time honoured line by line review and classifying spend by knowledge of supplier names and ‘gut feel’. This generally identifies 80% of the spend and can never account for those mis-coded spend items, or those deliberately hidden. Working with an MSP provider under NDA can streamline this process and make the heavy lifting and data analysis a far easier process. 

Bring your internal champion into discussions from the outset

My experience of operating MSP programmes around the world has demonstrated that there is nothing worse than a soft launch of a spend management programme and frequently attempts to introduce an MSP for non-permanent spend without an appropriate mandate or at the very least strong stakeholder engagement are far less successful than they could have been. Maximising the immediate benefits of an MSP and achieving the long-term Return On Investment can only occur when internal adoption is strong. 

The presence of an Internal Champion who is prepared to add their political weight to the adoption of the programmes makes a significant difference. Our studies have shown that the full benefits are realised four times faster with a good internal champion in place. 

A structured approach can deliver sustainable, long term change 

My advice for ensuring business buy-in and ultimately success is simple. Firstly, get senior engagement from the outset to sponsor the changes required by the programme. Secondly, ensure you canvass different perspectives from across all of your non-permanent workforce users so that their needs are understood and they are bought into the model that you procure. A well scoped MSP programme will deliver significant benefit to most organisations and getting these very early stages set up correctly is the difference between delivering a short term tactical gain versus a long term sustainable change to your sourcing channel.

Business engagement is just one section of our benchmarking survey, in future blogs I'll be exploring other areas such as defining your scope and creating a business case. I hope you find them valuable, and if nothing else a timely reminder that whilst maximising ROI takes time, investment and effort from all parties involved, it is an objective which we both share and looking at ways we can be more effective can only benefit both parties.

AUTHOR

Jon Mannall
EMEA Managing Director and Global Head of Sales, Solutions and Innovation, Hays Talent Solutions
Jonathan is the EMEA Managing Director and Global Head of Sales, Solution and Innovation for Hays Talent Solutions, having joined Hays in 2011. Previous roles held at Hays included Client Director, Service Delivery Director and Head of Sales for the UK. He is now responsible for leading the approach to engaging and securing new clients and to ensuring that the products and services offered by Hays Talent Solutions continue to meet the changing needs of our global, regional and local customers. For more information about Hays Talent Solutions, visit our website. 

Prior to joining Hays, and after completing his Masters in Philosophy and Management, Jon worked in the RPO and MSP sector for 10 years with a range of Financial Services, Public Sector, IT & Telecommunications, and Insurance clients in Sales and Operations Director roles.