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 Why the needs of your primary stakeholders should always take centre stage

WHY THE NEEDS OF YOUR PRIMARY STAKEHOLDERS SHOULD ALWAYS TAKE CENTRE STAGE

Primary stakeholders value insights more than the process

Our new whitepaper, “Becoming a Human Capital Catalyst”, provides an insider’s guide to maximising the value of a managed service programme through seven different lenses. In the chapter on Stakeholder Engagement, we explain why the needs of your primary stakeholders (the Hiring/Engagement managers) should always take centre stage.

This does not mean that the needs of secondary stakeholders (Procurement/Talent Acquisition) are unimportant. But for an MSP to deliver long term operational and competitive value within an organisation they cannot be given greater precedence than the needs of the people who are hiring or engaging the resources.

There is no such thing as a standard operating manual when it comes to MSP stakeholder management. It would be lovely if there was – but in the real world, no two primary stakeholders will ever think, feel and believe the same thing about the same set of circumstances at the same time. Therefore, situational learning is the only way you are going to get better at engaging with the different stakeholders you will encounter.

I have experienced the primary stakeholder landscape from multiple directions during my career and this has provided invaluable situational learning. I have been a procurement lead, a hiring manager of large and small teams, an operational client and budget-holder for an array of people-based SOW projects and I have sold and delivered third-party consulting services.

Given these diverse experiences, it would be quite easy for me to turn this blog into a top tips list. However, like most things in life, the experience is often best demonstrated through personal stories. So, I thought I would focus this blog around two of my own stories that, whilst they both occurred more than 10 years ago now, are still perfect illustrations of why the needs of primary stakeholders must be front and centre of any successful MSP programme.

Same work, different context

My first story concerns a customer service director that I was working alongside. His function was experiencing a marked increase in customer complaints and they were not responding anywhere near quickly or strongly enough. They needed to urgently diagnose root causes and then implement a corrective action plan. They were seeking an external Project Manager to work alongside them during the key phases of activity - data collection, analysis, recommendations, action planning and finally implementation support.

Hiring policy dictated that this PM would need to be sourced via the MSP and the director was given a range of qualified applicants, all of whom were available in the day rate range that had been benchmarked by the MSP and agreed with the internal procurement team. However, the director was adamant that they wanted to go outside the MSP and use a PM who had been recommended by a colleague at a day rate which was nearly 25% higher than the benchmark. Procurement/TA and the managed service were all completely baffled as to why the director was happy to pay so much more than they needed to for what appeared to be the same level of expertise.

Do you have any idea why?

Mum’s the word

Rather bizarrely the second story revolves around my mother. Now I love my mum to bits, but she does have three (sometimes very) challenging characteristics. The first is that she can often procrastinate. The second is that she can be quite risk averse. The third is that ever since I first started work in the late 1980’s she has never been able to explain what I do.

In 2009 I started running my own procurement consultancy firm. True to form despite my mother being very impressed that her son had started his own business she had no idea how to describe what it did. Around that same time, she first started talking about how she was intending to get her main bathroom re-fitted – she just had to decide what she wanted it to look like.

Many months later I was visiting and she casually mentioned that a plumber was going to be starting work the following week. I was genuinely shocked to hear this news and even more so when she proceeded to tell me of the steps that she had gone through.

She had written down her ideas for the bathroom. She had spoken to her friends and got their recommendations for a good local plumber. She had looked these firms up on the internet and found a couple of others too. Each firm had come around and listened to her requirements. Some had failed her initial criteria; like politeness, likeability and patience.  Those that survived were invited to give her a quote for the work. After considering her options she had decided which one she preferred, she finalised the terms and timescales with them and they were now about to start.

I was mightily impressed and wanted to tell her so. However, I also saw the ideal opportunity to finally help her understand what I did for a living. I said “Mum, that is brilliant I am so proud of you. Now you may not realise this, but you have basically gone through a structured buying process. And this is what I do at work. I help companies to buy different types of business services.”

I looked at her triumphantly thinking that at long last a penny was about to drop in her mind.  Unfortunately, it didn’t quite pan out like that. She just glanced at me slightly disapprovingly and said “Don’t be silly, Paul, no-one is going to pay you to do that. Why would someone need that kind of help… isn’t it obvious what they need to do?”.

So much for a penny dropping.

Driving home afterwards I remember replaying the situation in my mind and having the dawning realisation that a penny had indeed dropped. It had just dropped on me, not her.

Did you spot it?

Primary stakeholders decide emotionally and justify rationally

Do you have any idea why that customer service director was prepared to pay so much more for a Project Manager who on paper had the same level of expertise as someone else? Well, the answer was that this primary stakeholder had been in the job for five years. The increase in customer complaints had happened during their tenure – so they were understandably worried that this project could leave them personally exposed.

However, the recommended PM had led projects of a similar sensitivity before and they knew how to manage the politics of the situation. Technically they wouldn’t be doing anything different from the other applicants – but their political skills were much more likely to insulate the director from potential embarrassment. The director, therefore, felt that a higher day rate for this particular PM was well worth the money.

Contrast this with a situation where the customer service director was new in post. In that circumstance, he would have had no concerns about exposing any incompetence or complacency by his predecessor and so the PM’s technical skills alone would be enough to support the customer complaints work – and for whatever was the benchmarked day rate.

Primary stakeholders value insights more than the process

The experience with my mother was a light bulb moment at the time. It made me realise that because primary stakeholders make hiring decisions in their personal lives they automatically assume that they know everything they need to know about the core elements of the process. Identify the expertise required, define what you want them to do, identify potential candidates, choose your favourite and then agree with the terms of hire/engagement.

My mother did not feel she needed any help with the hiring process and she certainly doesn’t allow anyone to tell her how she should be spending her own money. But, given her risk averse nature, I do know her eyes would have lit up if I knew of a low-cost insurance option that would pay for any future work in the bathroom once the plumber had finished. Simply put I would have informed her decision making, and this is what primary stakeholders appreciate the most.

The common denominator

The over-arching point behind both these stories is that primary stakeholders need to feel enabled not controlled, and the road to enablement within an MSP programme is paved with insights not process rigour. Primary stakeholders will never feel positively about a rule based straightjacket and unfortunately, way too many MSP programmes are designed to be just that. These programmes are doomed to fail before they even start.

I hope you found these two stories thought provoking and if you have similar stories of your own I would love to hear them.

Once again if you would like to read our new whitepaper, “Becoming a Human Capital Catalyst”, click here.

AUTHOR

Paul Vincent
Global Head of Services Procurement, Hays Talent Solutions
Paul joined Hays Talent Solutions in May 2019 and is globally responsible for the definition, marketing and delivery of our Procurement, Statement of Work and Supplier Enablement related services.

He has been working on the supply side of the workforce solutions industry since 2015 and before that spent 6 years running his own consultancy practice helping a variety of different organisations to buy and sell business services more effectively. Prior to establishing Insight Sourcing Solutions, he spent 24 years working for BT Group plc where he held a series of senior level procurement, commercial and change management roles.

Paul is a member of the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply and Black Belt trained in Lean Six Sigma. During his career, he has built up a large and relatively unusual blend of expertise in the areas of Procurement Excellence, Talent Management and Sales & Marketing Effectiveness. This accumulated know-how, underpinned by the practical insights gained from leading a variety of transformational change initiatives over the years, has proved to be hugely beneficial to the organisations he has worked with. Paul regularly contributes to industry publications and is a seasoned keynote speaker.