Three character traits you can build to make yourself a more successful leader
Ever feel like advice on leadership is too abstract? Words like strategic, courageous, wise, and confident get thrown around.
Those feel like talents to me. And — quite frankly — those aren’t the traits that get it done. There are three with much more power than that.
The good news is that you don’t have to be born with them. You can build them through your actions.
Here are three character traits you can build yourself to make yourself a more successful leader.
1. Tenacity. When the going gets tough, leaders plant their feet and hold on.
I’ll be honest. My bias is to pray for adversity to go away instead of praying for the strength to face it. No one leads people without having to make hard decisions. Doing the right thing is rarely without personal cost.
The temptation is to think that you are going to get lucky. That you will reach short-term gains by cutting corners. And while all of us have the temptation to look for the easy path, good leaders don’t get the option of taking it — not if they want to do something lasting that matters, anyway.
Leadership guru, Jim Rohn, is famous for saying “Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better.” It’s a great aphorism, but there is no getting better without a tenacity for showing up day-after-day and doing the hard things.
Want to build your tenacity? Create a daily practice of doing what’s right even when it would be much easier not to. It produces incredible momentum over time.
2. Kindness. Being kind pays long-term benefits without a big investment.
While doing the right thing usually involves personal cost, the only thing kindness tends to cost us is a little bit of time and a lot of our ego.
Kindness is a type of generosity. When we feel secure in who we are and the mission we are on, we can share resources with others. Note that unkind leaders are often insecure using slights, criticisms, power plays and meanness to underscore their place in a hierarchy.
Tim Sanders says something along the lines of, “If you see people winning through doing the wrong thing, keep in mind you are not at the end of their story.” Being unkind is a short-term, ego-driven play.
Want to build your kindness? Be generous in all of your dealings. In doing it for others, you wind up doing it for you. The reward is so great and unexpected over time. (Plus you get the benefit of not outing your own insecurities.)
3. Willingness to ask for counsel — and to make the changes required to implement it.
Pretending to have it all together doesn’t cut it for a leader, which is why asking for counsel is such a factor in building success. The thing is, it isn’t enough to ask for counsel, the leader has to be willing to make the changes to get the benefit from it.
Early in my company’s history, we hired consultants (who my team affectionately called “the Bobs”) to help us break through a plateau. I learned the problem was with my hands-on leadership style. I was creating a bottle-neck that prevented others from taking ownership and leading. It wasn’t enough to hear the advice. I had to go through the painful process of changing how I led. But once I did it, it was an accelerator for our firm and our volume of work dramatically increased — not to mention our profits.
Jeff Goins writes, “Often, when asking for advice, a person isn’t really seeking something new. They’re just looking for validation, affirmation of a choice already made. And this is a problem.”
Want to build the value you get from counsel? Ask for real advice — not just validation, and then be willing to do the hard work of making the changes.
Want to be a great leader? You don’t actually have to be born one.
To be fair, this isn’t easy. You have to hang in there and tenaciously fight in order to deal with adversity like economic downturns. You have to be generous with kindness — even in the face of insecurities. And you have to be willing to ask for counsel, then make step-by-step change.
It doesn’t matter if the group you are leading is in an organization with massive scale, or if you lead a small company. You might have an impressive title, or you may have influence without formal assignment. (You may simply have aspirations to widen your impact.)
For leaders, the threat isn’t your competitor. The threat is losing the vision of making a difference of doing something that will outlast you. And as it turns out, tenacity, kindness and a willingness to ask for counsel are powerful tools in achieving that.
Luckily, you don’t have to be born with those traits. You can build them for yourself.
