Let’s dive into the characteristics that differentiate the most impactful leaders from everyday leaders — the leadership styles they use, why women leaders tend to be more impactful, and how to attract and retain the top talent in your organization.

What Is Leadership?

Warren Bennis, a world-leading leadership expert and former advisor to four US presidents, defines leadership as the capacity to create a compelling vision, translate it into action, and sustain it.

Qualities of a Good Leader

Keeping Warren’s definition in mind, there are some skills and qualities you can hone to move from a good leader to a great one:

1. Put Your Personal Development First

For personal growth to occur, a leader has to be self-aware—understand your strengths and weaknesses and work on improving your shortfalls. In addition, having an understanding that things can and will go wrong will help you to stay realistic.

Most importantly, set goals and ensure those goals are actually met. To achieve this, focus on the big picture and avoid distractions while setting boundaries between your personal and professional lives.

2. Prioritize Developing Others

In addition to self-development, good leaders develop their teams. By giving a hand to others, you help people explore and capitalize on their skills and abilities, empowering them to meet their career goals while serving the organization’s mission.

The best place to start is by onboarding a team with diverse skillsets and backgrounds—not only to tap into the rich pool of talent diversity hiring provides, but only to train and empower your team to achieve their potential.

As you offer training and teach by example, you need to show empathy and delegate duties according to abilities for better chances of success.

Beyond connecting with your teams, focusing your efforts on also making genuine connections with people outside your organization will provide opportunities to keep developing others and establish yourself as a thought leader.

3. Encourage Strategic Thinking, Innovation, and Action

In the same vein, a leader who seeks to develop others will include strategic thinking, innovation, and action in their leadership because these aspects create an enabling environment for growth.

To support these three growth factors, good leaders also maintain a flexible mindset and an open mind for trying new things.

It also requires taking a genuine interest in what your company and employees are all about so you can spot and encourage innovative ideas for the common good.

4. Thrive on Ethics and a Civic Mind

It’s one thing to have set ethics and values that your organization is supposed to live by—but it’s another thing to ensure they are actually implemented effectively and understood holistically.

That’s where good leadership comes in. An able leader understands how to use their power and authority appropriately to inspire their teams.

This works when you’re open, transparent, and authentic. To a large extent, it also calls for recognizing your emotions, how they affect others, and taking responsibility for the mistakes you make.

5. Practice Effective Cross-Cultural Communication

It’s highly unlikely that every employee in an organization shares the same culture with the rest of the employees. Good leaders practice effective cross-cultural communication to best engage and empower their teams.

A good leader weaves their communication around messages and words that are easy to understand regardless of cultural differences. As executive Aasma Khan notes, the use of similes and metaphors can create shared experiences and help bridge a language gap. Be careful, however, not to slip into colloquialisms (e.g., “sliding into home base” may be less well-understood than “winning a marathon”). You will also want to be sensitive to physical gestures that could be misinterpreted (the “OK” gesture, for example, has a very different meaning in the United States than in other parts of the world, and should be avoided). Speaking slightly slower, using simple grammar, and pausing to ask for a show of hands to see if your audience is following you are all strategies that can help you make your point effectively across different cultural backgrounds.

In short, changing your communication style to fit the diversity of the modern workplace displays empathy and increases your audience’s understanding. And don’t forget that a great leader tends to listen just as much as they talk.

The Most Effective Leadership Styles

Every leader has a unique leadership style. Here are 8 of the most effective ones:

• Democratic leadership
  This style is also called participative leadership because everyone participates in the decision-making. Typically, there’s a robust mechanism of exchange of ideas and a focus on group equality.
• Autocratic leadership
  This style is the opposite of a democratic leadership style. It is high-handed and takes a command-and-control approach. The decisions are often made by one person or a few of them and everyone else is expected to follow orders.
• Laissez-Faire leadership
  A laissez-faire leader trusts their teams and employees to use their creativity and resources to make decisions that help them meet their goals. They may guide employees at the start of a project, but afterward, they allow them to handle tasks with little to no supervision.
• Transactional leadership
  In a transactional leadership style setting, the relationship between leaders and their followers is based on a transaction. The leader delegates tasks and the follower completes the tasks in exchange for a salary or wages.
• Charismatic leadership
  Charismatic leaders are charming, good at communicating, and skilled at connecting with people. They use these skills to persuade and influence others and move them to action.
• Transformational leadership
  Transformational leadership is rooted in causing a change in people and society. It creates long-term change and focuses on transforming followers into leaders.
• Servant leadership
  Servant leadership aims to move management and employee interaction from control to cooperation. The executives in this case are servant-leaders who focus on the wellbeing of their employees above all.
• Bureaucratic leadership
  This leadership style follows a rigid governance approach where leaders must adhere to a system of rules that dictate how much authority they have and how to perform certain actions.

Why Women Make Great Leaders

A recent survey showed that people perceive women as being better leaders than men. Here are traits commonly found in women leaders that explain why that is the case:

•       Empathetic. This is an ability to put oneself in another’s shoes. It also involves feeling what someone else’s feeling and even taking on those feelings. It makes it easy to understand employees’ pain points and employee poor performance so you can help them to do better.
•       Great listeners. Active listening is a critical relationship and trust builder. This helps women build relationships with others and be open to feedback to helps them grow and develop effective leadership strategies.
•       Nurturing. Women are natural nurturers. In a leadership position, nurturing skills enable women to identify and help grow their follower’s abilities. It also enables them to listen empathetically.
•       Focus on teamwork. A focus on teamwork makes it easy to combine individual strengths for the good of the team or task at hand. Other benefits to this approach include improving employee performance and overall productivity.
•       Good at multitasking. BBC reported that women are better multitaskers than men. Multitasking allows more to be done in a short time. This ability has been proven to help people yield greater creativity.
•       Strong communicators. Communication enables leaders to rally their teams behind a common goal. Beyond that, it helps a leader to practice empathy and empower employees. With better communication comes better trust and a smoother sail through organizational change.
•       Handle crisis situations better. HBR proved that women leaders handle crises better because they are better at inspiring and motivating, communicating powerfully, and encouraging collaboration. Moreover, female leaders have a better understanding of the fears their followers may have and concern for their followers’ wellbeing.
•       Can wear many hats. All the traits that make women great leaders also enable them to perform various roles adeptly. They can be managers, a CEO sitting in the boardroom, coaches, crisis handlers, etc. They thrive in marketing, sales, HR, tech, and more. At the end of the day, each of these hats provides a well-balanced organization. In most cases, these roles benefit the communities the organizations operate in too.
•       High emotional intelligence. EI is the ability to be self-aware, manage your emotions, and recognize how those emotions affect others. High EI is bound to get an organization further than IQ alone. In fact, EI accounts for nearly 90% of what differentiates high performers from counterparts with hard skills.
•       Flexible. Flexibility allows you to handle change better and make space for ideas that improve functionality in an organization. More importantly, they can change their leadership styles to adapt to unexpected circumstances.

How to Attract and Retain Women Leaders

To attract and keep your most powerful women leaders, consider doing the following:

1. Address Women’s Leadership Challenges and Needed Competencies

Gender inequality has high costs in society and can be surprisingly difficult to stamp out, even when all stakeholders are in agreement about the need for gender inclusivity. From job ads to recruitment messaging to company manuals, ensure your company uses gender-inclusive language and take steps to ensure that the internal culture matches the inclusive messaging of your recruitment messaging.

Workplace policies that benefit families can help women build their careers faster, as can programs to advance education and expanded networking opportunities. When a company specifically addresses the challenges women face in career growth and development, the payoff is a greatly expanded, empowered, and energized network of women stakeholders.

2. Leverage the Power of Choosing

People are more productive in workplaces where they have more choices. Research shows when a person has a choice over their work and work environment, they are less prone to develop physical and mental health issues. For a group that often has to fight harder to have a say, instilling a culture of choice in your workplace will make it conducive for women leaders. 

One of the best examples of this power comes from Karen Mangia, who said General Mills recognized their 10,000-employee base had a burnout problem. They offered additional PTO to give people a break, but only 8% of employees used it. Burnout persisted. After deep listening sessions with their employees, they announced their Gift of Choice program with three options for benefits: more PTO, more pay, or a donation to a nonprofit of their choice.

“Within 24 hours, 85% of their employees opted in to the Gift of Choice program, and the top choice was PTO,” Karen said. “They got to the same outcome; the only thing that shifted was people had a choice.”

3. Rethink Systems and Challenge Assumptions

While all companies rely to a certain extent on traditions and customs, saying “we’ve always done it like this” is a sure way to squelch your team’s creativity and enthusiasm. When your team feels free to challenge assumptions and the status quo, they feel empowered—and the resulting conversations can set off a chain reaction of positive change that affects the entire organization.

How can this be accomplished? A great leader will start by creating an environment that is open to all perspectives and include stakeholders who may be affected by any change in policy or strategy. Being open and ready to implement change, even when it is difficult, can foster an environment where creativity and innovation are rewarded, helping the team and company accomplish its goals.  

4. Consider a Women-Only Leadership Development Experience

This is geared to help the women in your workforce improve their skills while learning about leadership. It is not only designed to make them feel valuable, but it helps those looking for leadership opportunities to do the legwork for getting there.

When in doubt, you can always consult experts on women in the workplace to help you decide which development courses are best suited for your company and industry. Consider regular (once or twice a year) or continuous executive education experiences for your women leaders to ensure they stay up-to-date on the current issues and best practices in business.

5. Create the Right Networks

While networks are crucial and more reliable than job platforms when it comes to attracting women leaders, it’s still true that we tend to hire who we know—and people who know who we know. That often means we hire people who look like us and who come from similar backgrounds. Leaders must get intentional about expanding their networks to source and empower diverse talent.

Conclusion

Douglas Mac Arthur summarizes leadership by saying, “A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make tough decisions, and the compassion to listen to the needs of others. He does not set out to be a leader, but becomes one by the equality of his actions and the integrity of his intent.”

Athena Alliance helps women leaders reach their biggest career goals—as they rise into the C-suite, join the boardroom, and transform their organizations. If you’re looking for expert help in developing your senior executives, we’re here to help.