Leaders:
- Communicate exceptional focus of commitment, which attracts other people to them
- Understand the necessity of integrating many different initiatives, factors, projects, people, etc. into a common effort toward a common goal
- Make ideas tangible and real to others, so others can support them
- Know their skills and deploy them effectively
- Take responsibility for being players rather than spectators
- Accept the possibility of being wrong and get rid of worry as an obstacle to clear thinking
- Generate a shared vision and values
- Create a sense of hope
- Hold people accountable
- Focus on performance
- Create a sense of urgency
- Reduce the fear of failure and risk-taking
- Reward learning, experimentation and innovation
- Live the organization’s values
- Coach and teach
- Fight complacency
- Delegate and then get out of the way
- Ask questions and really listen to the answers
- Say “we” instead of “I” and “you”
- Make people feel significant
- Are trustworthy – you know what they stand for
- Trust others
- Encourage diversity of opinion
- Give credit to others
- Involve people in decisions that affect them
- Show genuine respect to everyone, including those who disagree with them
- Boost egos
- Find common personal ground
- Praise publicly, criticize privately
- Give bad news in person
- Share information
- Ask for help when they need it
- Admit when they don’t know something
- Spread the glory, shoulder the blame
- Understand how every single action furthers achievement of organizational mission and goals
I got started on the path of enumerating leadership behaviors after I read James O’Toole’s Leadership A to Z: A Guide for the Appropriately Ambitious (Jossey Bass, Inc., 1999), which is a wonderful book on leadership. Esther Wachs Book’s Why the Best Man for the Job is a Woman (HarperCollins, 2000) is also useful.