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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GIVE YOUR EMPLOYEES THE RECOGNITION THEY DESERVE

Give your employees the recognition they deserve

Headline-grabbing perks have been a trend for many companies in recent years. However, some organisations are now exploring if offering improved recognition could be more beneficial for their people.

In recent years, unusual perks and rewards have increasingly been used as differentiators for many organisations. From taking 6,400 staff on holiday, as Chinese conglomerate Tiens Group did in 2015, to offering egg freezing to female employees as Apple and Facebook have done, businesses are finding new ways to attract and retain staff. But could it be much simpler?

World at Work’s 2017 Trends in Employee Recognition report found that nearly three-quarters (72 per cent) of organisations have a budget for recognition programmes, with over half of senior management members viewing employee recognition programmes as an investment. Yet the 2017 Global State of Employee Engagement study, which surveyed 1,000 organisations in 157 countries, found that 63 per cent of employees feel they don’t get enough praise, with eight per cent never receiving it.

The difference recognition can make

The fact that so many workplaces are foregoing recognition is concerning, given the impact doing so can have on a business, including its culture.

“Workplace culture comprises six elements: purpose, opportunity, success, appreciation, wellbeing and leadership,” explains O.C. Tanner’s Alexander Lovell, Manager of Institute Research & Assessment.

“Recognition has a tangible impact on each one of them. When it is used to improve culture, we have seen a significant impact on an organisation’s ability to retain, engage and attract talent. For example, we saw engagement increase 129 per cent in organisations that move from weak to strong recognition practices. Additionally, people stay with an organisation two to four years longer when best practice service recognition is implemented.”

Making emotional connections is key

But how do employers define employee recognition? While many would relate rewards and recognition to monetary bonuses or extravagant awarding events, employee appreciation doesn’t have to be connected to anything financial.

“Employee recognition is about creating an emotional connection between employees and the company, while supporting the work employees do and staying authentic to the company’s values,” says Tatiana Braz Garbossa, HR Manager LATAM at Hays.

“If you don’t listen to your people, and if you don’t know what their aspirations and motivations are, you can invest a great deal of time, money and energy on employee recognition without getting any real results.”

The fact that recognising employees costs considerably less than rewarding them with monetary bonuses etc. doesn’t make it any less effective. Taking the time to show recognition is likely to be considered a more personal and therefore more effective way of rewarding staff.

Good recognition fundamentally begins with treating people as individuals and recognising what motivates them personally, says Kirsty Bashforth, CEO of corporate advisory business Quayfive. “That sense of belonging, identity, motivation, confidence, mood, engagement: these are all required in all forms of life to get the best out of people. It’s no different in work,” she says.

Never forget to say thank you

It is important to remember that there are many modalities of recognition and that each one has a different impact. Lovell says: “We found that a deliberate ‘thank you’ increases an employee’s feeling of appreciation by 116 per cent, spontaneous praise increases it by 172 per cent, while formal recognition increases appreciation by 355 per cent.”

Many experts agree that an effective employee recognition strategy has to be led from the top, and that its success rests with the leadership.

“For a company to succeed in this area, everyone – the leaders especially – should be more aware, and in some cases trained or coached on when and how to recognise their teams,” says Garbossa. “In many cases, leaders need a formal methodology to help them apply recognition effectively, and that will support them in using it as a powerful management technique.”

Recognition can come from many places

There are different types of recognition programmes:

1. In a top-down recognition scheme, for example, it is the employer or manager who recognises the contributions of employees, often in tangible ways such as presenting an award, or intangible, such as verbal praise.

2. In peer-to-peer recognition, everyone in the organisation plays a part in recognising the often quiet but critical high performers.

Many modern recognition programmes use internal social media, such as recognition-specific tools or apps, to instantly recognise workers who go the extra mile, with the results displayed on the staff intranet or company social channels so that anyone can see them.

Annual recognition awards events single out the top performers, for example in the customer service arena, or for simply demonstrating company values. The effect is often to inspire other employees to do the same.

However, Bashforth challenges the notion that leaders could benefit from formal training in employee recognition. She says: “For me, the bottom line is that someone is not ready to be a leader if they do not hold recognition as a valuable part of their role, along with boundaries, direction, space, support and development.”

How to measure motivation

Employers will want to compare recognition strategies with other forms of employee benefits in terms of any potential business benefits or drawbacks. A key benefit of recognition, for example, is that it serves something that most forms of compensation and benefits cannot address: feeling valued.

“It is human nature to want others to acknowledge you and value your contributions,” says Lovell. “It serves a unique psychological need and increases the connection between peers and leaders. This connection is critical because it forms and strengthens a relationship that can be leveraged in the future, and it helps the employee feel like they belong.”

A potential drawback is that recognition can be used as an incentive, blurring the line between compensation, benefits and recognition. “This can lead to systemic failures in a recognition strategy, and employees feeling more unappreciated,” adds Lovell.

In implementing any sort of employee recognition programme, the one question that employers need to be clear about is what they are recognising people for. All too often, recognition is for something they have done, the outcome.

Bashforth says: “If an organisation really wants to shift the way it behaves, and change its culture, it has to start recognising what people have done and how they have done it. It is important to recognise both.”

Equally, she points out, organisations should be aware of the risks of individuals’ overexpectations around recognition. She says: “For example, some people confuse recognition with promotion, and take it as a sign that the company doesn’t value them when it doesn’t happen. The flip side of that is that leaders must offer enough of the truth. Honest constructive feedback is just as valuable as a part of recognition.”

AUTHOR


Trisha Brookes
Director of People and Culture, Hays UK&I
Trisha started her HR career in financial services before moving to Hays Specialist Recruitment in 2002 to provide HR consultancy services to clients, supporting them on their people plans, mergers and acquisitions.

Trisha has held a number of roles within Hays including: Head of Organisational Change and Head of HR for UK&I. In 2016 she was a founding member of the Diversity & Inclusion team resulting in the NES accreditation awarded to Hays in December 2017.

In 2018 she was appointed to the UK&I Board as Director of People and Culture for UK&I where she oversees HR, Training, Recruitment and Diversity and Inclusion.