5 Essential Attributes in Leading Others

Leading others brings new demands on individuals and requires them to have or develop new competencies and attributes.  People are often promoted into posts where they are required to lead others because they were high performers at doing a task orientated job.  Yet leading others does require different skills from doing something yourself.  So what are 5 essential attributes in successfully leading others?

Providing feedback

The first essential attribute in leading others is to learn how to provide feedback.  People in organisations are looking for feedback, praise and recognition for what they are doing to help you get results.  A large proportion of our life is spent at work and we all like to feel valued.  If you had to rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 in terms of providing feedback (10 being excellent) what score would you give yourself?  Providing feedback takes little or no time, costs nothing and is one of the biggest contributors to a happy workforce and staff retention levels.

Listening and involving

An autocratic style where people were told what to do and get on with it will not work in the modern business world.  People want to be involved in contributing to key decisions and feel that their points of view have been heard.  As the leader, you clearly need to take the final decision.  Chances are that not everyone will agree with the decision but if you have taken the time to listen to and involve others in the decision process, they are more likely to get behind the decision you reach.

Getting the balance right

One of the challenges in leading others is getting the balance right between delegating to others and keeping track on progress.  Too much involvement could result in the other person or team thinking that you don’t trust them.  Too little involvement could mean that you find out too late that things are off track and deadlines are going to be missed.  Making the time at the outset to brief others, check their understanding and agree review points is a simple but effective way of getting the balance right.

Setting objectives

In leading others, it is vitally important to set clear objectives.  Leaders sometimes fall into the trap of believing that a long job description with lots of detail about what the employee is required to do serve that purpose.  In addition to this, make a point of setting around 6 key objectives for each person.  These objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, results orientated and time limited.

Training and developing

When leading others you need to make the time and give the commitment to training people.  So often employers put in a lot of effort when it comes to employing people but make no investment of time and/or money in training and developing people.  As a leader, you need to make the time to help people grow and get better at what they do.

Successfully leading others is vital to the success of an organisation.  You may already be performing outstandingly in this area.  If you are the challenge is to keep yourself at this high performance level.  If you are still developing as a leader, where do you need to focus on to move towards outstanding performance?