Leadership Series: Four Crucial Leadership Characteristics

If you study any great leader, you will find they have many characteristics that contribute to their success.  Below are four that are the most fundamental.  Start with these first and build upon them.

Leadership Characteristic #1: Compelling Desire

When you take on a leadership role in any project or organization, you must have a goal, a vision of the end game that you want to achieve.  That goal must be driven by a compelling desire for it to happen.  Why do you want to achieve this?  For everyone, it’s the pain/pleasure factor – to get away from a pain or to gain pleasure.  Simple as that.  What is yours?

For example, you take on a leadership role in your Toastmasters club because you want to see the club membership grow.  Why?  So that it will be easier to fill roles?  So that your club can achieve the DCP goals?

Ask yourself the reason until it becomes so compelling that nothing will stop you from achieving it.

Leadership Characteristic #2: Firm Belief

So you have the desire to want to achieve that goal.  You now have to believe in it and you also have to instill that belief on your team.  Otherwise they will not want to work with you.  Do you believe that the goal is worth achieving?  Do you believe that in achieve that goal you will see the desired results you want to get?  It is this belief that will keep you grounded and keep your eye on the mission.

Most important of all, do you believe in your abilities to lead the team and in the team’s ability as well?

Leadership Characteristic #3: Effective Action

Great leaders take effective action.  A lot of times, people in leadership positions create a lot of work for people to do, but the end result of all that work is just making people busy with very little achieved.  Take a look at your actions and the things that you want to do in order to achieve your goal.  How effective are they?  When evaluating these, you need to be objective.   This means you cannot involve your emotions in it.

So if you have been investing your weekends to attend networking events in order to get new members for your club but have not been able to recruit any, it’s time to take a look at your approach.  Perhaps you have just been talking to the wrong group of people, or you have not addressed their needs.

Leadership Characteristic #4: Iron Will

In all of the above, this one characteristic is the binding factor that holds everything together.  You have the Compelling Desire to achieve your goal, you have the Firm Belief that your goal will contribute towards the greater good and in your ability to achieving it and you take Effective Action.

That was just the foundation.  Once all that is in place, it’s normally the waiting game.  Things are not going to happen instantly and you need to be able to wait it out.  This is where Iron Will comes in.  There will be times in your journey that you feel like giving up – when things go wrong, when your team has disagreements, when you hit a setback.

The Iron Will will fortify everything.  It is the glue that keeps the foundation rock solid and keeps the team going.  It is the one thing that will help you continue the fight when faced with setback after setback.

How many of these characteristics do you have.

If you would like to learn effective communication skills as well as learn leadership skills that you can put in practice immediately, join us for our bi-monthly meetings on every 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of the month.  Please refer to our Next Meeting page for information on our next meeting or contact us directly to see how we can help you achieve your goals.