Are you striving to advance your career and make a big impact in your professional life? You’re not alone! With over 55 million millennials in the workplace, the opportunity is growing rapidly for millennials to become the next leaders of their organizations. Many are seeking to learn the (7) essential traits of a leader to help them become successful.
Millennials are seeking to learn the traits of a leader that focus more on building relationships, empowering people, and nurturing innovation. This is a pivot and evolution from the typical top-down leadership style of baby boomers.
An interesting statistic I came across by Apollo Technical found that “More than 77% of organizations report that leadership is lacking, and while that is a big number, it should not come as a surprise given that 10,000 Baby Boomers retire every single day.
The opportunity is rapidly growing for Millennials to be promoted into leadership positions! Developing the essential traits of a leader will help you get into these positions faster.
This article won’t cover all the essential traits of a leader. Instead, it will go into detail about the 7 essential traits of a leader I learned which have contributed to a successful career thus far. Lets take a look.
7 Essential Traits of a Leader:
- Transfer Authority
- Lead With Questions Not Answers
- Encourage Experiments
- Embrace Problems and Issues
- Understand the Problem Before Solution Jumping
- Be a Systems Thinker
- Practice Reflection
1. Transfer Authority
In a typical top-down approach, important decisions are made higher up on the org chart. The issue with this approach is that good information usually lives with the front-line team members doing the work, not in the boardrooms where decisions are being made.
A more effective strategy is to give decision-making power to the teams that are closely tied to the work. Empowering them to be more autonomous and make important decisions will yield bigger benefits in the long term. On a more self-interested note, it will also lessen your burden of making all the important decisions.
However, it’s vital to note that you should transfer this authority to high-performing and highly competent team members.
Some examples of transferring authority include:
- Empowering teams to set their own goals
- Allowing customer service agents to creatively compensate customers for issues and complaints (Check out this article to see how Southwest Airlines applies this with their employees.)
- Letting team members lead important meetings
- Enabling your team to bring forth their ideas, concerns, and recommendations in line with strategies you are working on
- Involving your team in decision making
David Marqeut, a leadership guru, has a success story on transferring authority. Watch how he used this approach as a submarine captain in his Youtube Video below, “Turn The Ship Around”. It’s an incredible approach and I watch it frequently to remind me of the importance of empowering people to achieve big goals.
2. Lead With Questions Not Answers
A leader is typically the one with all the answers, and someone who does a lot of telling and delegating, right?
It’s how a lot of established leaders got into their positions. The problem with this is that you become the “answer person” for your team… all the time. It’s hard to simultaneously do your job while helping your team with theirs.
To help your team members become more autonomous, practice asking questions rather than telling. More specifically, practice Humble Inquiry and ask open-ended questions to elicit their critical thinking skills.
By adopting this trait as a leader, you will shift from being the “answer person” to the coach. If you are already in a coaching position, you will be a stronger leader rather than the person everyone goes to for answers.
Here are some examples of how you can practice asking questions to learn:
- Ask your team what they need to be successful and how you can enable them to do their best work.
- Ask them what is getting in their way routinely and what their ideas are to resolve those issues.
- Use the Socratic questioning method to get employees to think deeper about their work.
- Go deeper than surface-level questions; ask them what they are worried about and what support they need.
3. Encourage Experiments
Your typical approach at work might be to create the “best” plan and then implement it. Unfortunately, creating the best plan takes a lot of time, and you’re not sure if it works until it’s time for implementation. Often, when it comes time for implementation, a lot of unforeseen issues tend to arise.
To identify and resolve these issues earlier, encourage an experimentation mindset. Encouraging an experimentation mindset creates psychological safety for your team to try something new. It also normalizes making it ok to fail, think outside of the box, innovate, and most importantly, learn!
Failure typically results in reflection, which leads to learning. The more your team learns, the better results they will be able to achieve in the future. Some examples of how to practice this as a leader are:
Ask your team to formulate a hypothesis before they try something using “if / then” statements. (Remember the scientific method??)
- Reinforce their psychological safety by normalizing experiments to tackle a novel challenge.
- Reframe failure or not achieving desired results by encouraging them to reflect on what happened, what they learned, and what they may want to try next
- Coach and guide them back to the Learning Zone
4. Embrace Problems and Issues
This leader trait can be a huge dynamic shift for some people. Additionally, it has been one of the more challenging traits to develop in my list of 7 traits of a leader.
You may be wondering: “Why do I need to embrace problems and issues? Shouldn’t we always strive to avoid them?” I have learned that when a work culture embraces and normalizes the escalation of issues, team members feel more comfortable sharing their concerns.
I recall a time when my team was at our Monday morning huddle. We usually reported on the plan for the week, team celebrations, and if there were any risks or escalations to call out. But on this particular Monday, there were a lot of escalations scribbled in red on our team’s whiteboard.
At the end of our meeting, our manager said, “Wow, there’s a lot of red on the board this week. Thank you for having the courage to call out risks and issues you are experiencing, and I will get started on resolving these with you.”
This was an awesome demonstration of leadership and the right way for a leader to react to problems.
Here are some ideas for how to create a culture that embraces problems and issues:
- Frequently check in with your team members in a one-on-one setting and ask what’s working well and what they are concerned about.
- Thank the people you work with for bringing up issues and escalations (positive reinforcement).
- Normalize that the sooner you know about issues, the faster you can partner with your team to resolve them.
- Use a visual board where team members can call out issues and risks. Miro is a great and free virtual whiteboard tool I frequently use
5. Understand the Problem Before Solution Jumping
Quickly jumping to solutions can seem like an efficient way to solve issues and problems. Unfortunately, without breaking down a complex problem and taking the time to understand the underlying issues, you are most likely resolving a symptom of a larger problem.
When just the symptoms of problems are resolved, they are typically temporary, can arise again in the future, and can be even more complex to solve.
Instead of solution jumping, try to understand the problem at a deep level to ensure you are resolving the root cause. The first step in understanding a problem is to know the current state.
Once the current state is understood, you can then start to envision what the ideal state is. The distance between the current state and the ideal state is the gap.
The gap will indicate how far you are from your goal, and then you can begin a discussion about the various root causes that are contributing to the gap. This is a “go slow to go fast” model of problem-solving, and it is a tried-and-true approach to ensuring that problems, once resolved, remain resolved.
Here are some ways that you can more deeply understand a problem:
- Ensure you have a thorough understanding of the current state (refer to the skill of “making decisions where the work happens”).
- Collaborate with colleagues to envision an ideal state.
- Quantify the gap between the current state and the ideal state. For example:
- Team productivity is 30% below what it was last year
- Customer feedback is at 3 out of 5 stars on a service being offered
- Only 50% of reports are being completed on time
- Use root cause analysis tools: A Pareto Chart, Fishbone Diagram, or ask the 5 Why’s
6. Be a Systems Thinker
This leader trait has been difficult for me to develop and hone, but it’s been worth the effort, because systems are all around us personally and professionally. Some different systems you may be a part of are: a neighborhood community, your family, your immediate work team, the organization you work for, and many more.
Being a systems thinker means that you are not solely focused on just the scope of your work, but instead you’re looking at it holistically to see the work as a collection of individual entities or processes that come together, AKA a system.
By viewing the world as a series of systems and your work/contribution as a component of that system, you can make better decisions that will have a positive overall impact.
Here are some ways to practice system thinking:
- Be cognizant of how your work is impacting upstream and downstream processes by creating a process map.
- Enable cross-collaboration and feedback loops with teams that interact with your processes and work.
- Engage with various stakeholders and become familiar with their needs, wants, and preferences.
- Ensure you understand the bigger picture – talk to your leader, align your work with organizational goals, etc.
- Be able to telescope between high-level and low-level goals and processes, so you have views of both.
7. Practice Reflection
It’s hard to get better when you don’t know what to improve upon. Self-improvement can come from other people’s feedback, but it’s also important to seek it from another important source: Yourself!
Practicing reflection is a critical leader trait because it enables you to build self-awareness. As your self-awareness grows, you will have a better pulse of your strengths, as well as areas to improve.
When done consistently, reflection helps to build resiliency and confidence, which is something all leaders need.
Furthermore, practicing reflection ensures that you take the time to pause, recognize what you have been doing well, and acknowledge your wins. I believe that everyone should celebrate their victories more often and keep doing what works.
Here are some tips to build your reflection routines:
- Ensure you take the time to document your learnings (positive and constructive) after you finish a project.
- At the end of the work week, dedicate time on your calendar (~15-30 mins) to reflect: what went well this week and what can I do better next week?
- Reflect on conversations, meetings, projects, etc.
- Make a personal development plan on areas you would like to improve upon.
- Be honest but give yourself some grace; perfection is not a realistic expectation, but continuous improvement should be.
Get Started!
It will take time and practice to develop these 7 next-level traits of a leader. I recommend using the competency scale below to self-assess each of these traits and grouping them into three categories: “Feel Capable,” “Can Do Some,” or “Struggle With.” This scale will help you to decide on where to focus your time learning and practicing these leader traits. Also, to set yourself up for success, just pick one to start!
*After completing the self-assessment, pick just one trait you would like to practice developing
Adopting these 7 traits of a leader have made me more humble and helped me to build incredible relationships with people. It’s amazing to see what can be achieved when the right style of leadership sets people up for success!
I am excited for you to get started on developing these 7 traits of a leader. I’m also looking forward to the benefits you and your team will reap because of your next-level leadership! Get in touch with me if you have any questions or need a thought partner, and as always, let me know how things are going in the comments section below!