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 Staffing procurement resolutions you can actually stick to

STAFFING PROCUREMENT RESOLUTIONS YOU CAN ACTUALLY STICK TO

With a broken leg taking me off the roads for much of 2017, my 2018 New Year’s resolution, cycle more, should be easy to keep. I know the realities of making this happen, like many of the ideas in the plethora of ‘top trends to watch for in 2018’ articles that appear this time of year, aren’t as straight-forward. So to kick off the new year I bring you the staffing procurement changes you can realistically implement in 2018.

1. Profile and prioritise your stakeholders to improve engagement

Procurement can’t work in a silo and nowhere is this more true than in the staffing category. To bring functions on board with your processes a simple stakeholder mapping exercise, where you brainstorm who your stakeholders are and their level of power and interest can really make a difference.

Profiling and prioritising stakeholders and their requirements can help you identify and plan for right level of engagement and communication – for example, who needs an occasional meeting over coffee and who needs a formal monthly catch up to discuss their resourcing and staffing needs.

But if you really want to shift the dial you’ll need to demonstrate expertise, so ensure in preparation you’re aware of the trends impacting staffing in their market, as well as the performance of their key suppliers. By showing how your staffing procurement activity aligns to their business objectives, and that you’ve considered the specifics of their market you can more easily move to a win/win partnership with your internal stakeholders.

2. Considering raising your rate cards for savings

Now this one may sound madness, how can increasing rates reduce costs? As we see large demand and low supply for talent forcing below market pricing may exacerbate programme avoidance, increase misuse of SOW and discourage suppliers. By reviewing market trends and data to align your rates to the market, and by giving trusted suppliers some flexibility to negotiate wages and rates as needed, you develop relationships which deliver real business benefits so there’s no reason for uncompliant overspend.

3. Ask your suppliers how you could better take advantage of their expertise

Chances are the technology, suppliers and solutions providers you already have in place have capabilities you aren’t using. Maybe you don’t know about them because you didn’t need them before, or maybe they have developed since you first put them in place. Either way be sure to get them in to discuss your programme and wider business objectives and challenges, where you are now and where you want to go. This openness will allow them the opportunity to talk to you about what else you could be taking advantage of. It may sound scary opening yourself up to being ‘sold to’ but you may find there are things you’re already paying for.

4. Improve your access to talent by focusing on contingent worker satisfaction

It’s not news to anyone that most companies are facing serious sourcing challenges for certain skill sets and this won’t change in 2018. Whilst your company or programme might not be ready for investing in all the tech and tools to support direct sourcing/contingent RPO to better attract this talent, a virtually cost-free way to identify the right action you need to take is making contingent worker satisfaction an active key performance indicator.

We all know the old adage, you can’t manage or improve what you don’t measure. Simply by monitoring performance and satisfaction of contingent workers you will equip your organisation with the information required to improve retention and quality. This may also help the business case for when your business is ready to make the move towards building engaged talent pools with better targeted marketing.

5. If you make one investment, make it one that means better access and understanding of data

Whether you upskill your existing team or bring in external experts, investing in people, tools and systems that allow you to better understand and analyse the data associated with your staffing is a must.

The increasing digitisation of procurement processes means buyers have more data than ever to help them in negotiations. However, the use of data and analytics in reality is still massively underutilised in staffing, as businesses either don´t have access to relevant data sources or lack expertise when it comes to the actual data science and making sense of it all.

Understandably, many talent professionals are feeling overwhelmed due to the sheer volume of recruitment tools, technologies and data that are appearing on the market every day. We’ve all heard about AI screening and virtual reality tours, but without meaningful data, either to help build the tools in the first case or justify the investment, these tools will fail.

If you focus less on the data and technologies and more on understanding why they’re being used and the context, for example, advanced analytics to better predict high performers or chatbots to provide an enhanced candidate experience in order to better engage talent, you’ll have more chance of realising success.

Final note

As a minimum to make sure your approach to staffing procurement moves forward this year as usual it comes back to the basics, identify your objectives, set yourself a plan for how you’ll achieve them, monitor your progress and review and update as needed. On that note I might even start myself a cycling schedule.

AUTHOR


Matthew Dickason
Global Managing Director, Hays Talent Solutions
Matthew is the Global Managing Director for Hays Talent Solutions, having joined Hays in 2005. Previous roles held at Hays include Business Director in the UK and Chief Operating Officer for Asia Pacific. He is now responsible for leading the global business of Hays Talent Solutions and investing to ensure clients retain a competitive advantage in talent acquisition from the delivery of Hays MSP, RPO, technology and modular service solutions. For more information about Hays Talent Solutions, visit our website.

Prior to joining Hays, Matthew worked within Engineering, Research, Operations and Commercial areas at Johnson Matthey and Corning Inc. He has formal qualifications in Organisational Psychology and Industrial Engineering.