We all want to be successful, and there are six traits that many of the leading business leaders display that help fuel their path to the top.
1. Good Communicators
You can’t be a leader if you can’t convince people to follow you. Likewise, you can’t get people to invest time or money into your ideas if they don’t understand what they’re all about. Good communication skills are thus essential. These can range from eye contact and a clear, confident, distinct speaking voice to knowing how to empathetically and intellectually connect with audiences so as to phrase things in a way as to convinces them personally.
2. Accountability and Responsibility
Nobody is perfect, and everybody makes mistakes. Nothing will make people lose respect for you as a leader faster than acting as though those two truisms don’t exist. Being the leader doesn’t mean you get to dodge blame for things going wrong. On the contrary, a huge part of leadership is taking responsibility for setbacks and telling clients and employees alike how they’re going to be fixed in the future. Accountability and trustworthiness are key – lose that, and you may lose your team or client’s confidence for good.
3. Set Clear Goals
Part of being a good communicator is being able to set clear goals for your workers and make them understand what those goals are, why they’re important, and how they’re going to be accomplished. Vagueness, by contrast, is a mark of bad leadership. To truly “lead” people, after all, they have to think you know where you’re “going,” and that means communicating that to them with clear checkpoints.
4. Be Creative
Every great idea begins with a vision. Show off your creative side, and create a work environment where others feel safe and encouraged to do the same.
5. Be Critical
A big part of creativity is being able to use criticism to improve your work. The Beatles critiqued each other’s songs, as did the Impressionists with one another’s paintings, and the British Modernists with their poems and novels. The result was better art all around. True creativity isn’t a thin-skinned defense of flawed finished work, but taking well-meaning well-constructed criticism to heart to see how addressing those flaws can make your work even better.