Today’s increasingly entrepreneurial workplaces demand great leaders who inspire enthusiasm, loyalty and trust and can motivate their teams to consistently overreach and achieve stellar results. Bayt.com discusses ten characteristics of great leaders.
To have a happy and motivated team of followers, leaders must be able to paint a vivid and uniquely attractive picture of the ultimate destination and remain focused on it at all times. Effective leaders have a clearly articulated vision of where they are headed and the ability to paint a vivid picture and tell exciting stories about the end goal and its ramifications, why it’s so important and how they will strive to get there. The more colorful, interesting and exciting the picture and vision, the more animated, unified and aligned the troops are likely to be.
All the facts and supporting figures in the world are likely to fall on deaf ears if a leader does not demonstrate real and genuine passion for the mission, vision and values they are espousing. Positivity is highly contagious and none more so than the genuine enthusiasm and drive of a truly passionate leader.
Leaders need not be always marching in the battlefield alongside the troops but they must have great team skills and the proven expertise, tools and mastery of their domain to be able to participate in the action whenever needed as well as a genuine willingness and propensity to collaborate, cooperate and guide on the field. Delegation skills are essential but great leaders are able to masterfully tow the line between too much and too little and can delegate optimally without micromanaging to the point of alienating the teams, or alternately over-delegating to the point of abdicating. In the MENA region, while the majority of professionals say they are supervised just right, 31% feel over-supervised, whereas 15% of professionals say they are not supervised at all, at work. Great leaders don’t just strategize and supervise; they execute.
36% of professionals in the Middle East as polled by Bayt.com agree that they have open communication channels at their workplace, but they are not as open as they would like them to be. The best leaders do not assume they know it all, to the contrary they listen intently and listen often. They listen to their teams, their customers, their competitors, their stakeholders and the marketplace and are always asking themselves and others how they can do things more uniquely and do things better. They are great mentors and coaches and highly effective and influential communicators.
Leaders are leaders because they have willing followers who admire and respect them and they are able to retain their followings and consistently raise the bar in their organizations by ensuring good performance is recognized and rewarded both privately and publicly and as often as possible. 62.2% of professionals in the region as polled by Bayt.com claim that they do receive recognition or praise at work. Great leaders give credit where it is due and consistently allow others on their team to shine.
Great leaders aren’t always extremely likeable even if their brands and companies are. But a significant reason they can retain undisputed leadership status is they maintain exemplary standards of professionalism, integrity and transparency and deliver consistently on the promises they make. Some leaders are genuinely more intrinsically likeable than others but even less affable ones are still able to inspire, motivate and excite their teams to pioneering innovations and general excellence by the sheer force of their unimpeachable character and credibility. They inspire trust and thereby instill high levels of loyalty in their team. In a Bayt.com MENA poll 39% of respondents indicated they feel their management is extremely professional, 33% indicated their management was moderately professional and 28% indicated they felt their management was not professional. Moreover, a significant 13% of professionals in a separate Bayt.com poll indicated what they like most about their current work is the management.
Great leaders are malleable and ductile and will anticipate and adjust to changing market dynamics, needs and preferences in the most optimal manner because they recognize the need for responsiveness, speed and innovation. Their products brands and companies thrive because they can embrace, anticipate and pre-empt change rather than deny its inevitability. Even their management style will pivot flexibly and expertly depending on circumstances and need, between telling, delegating, participating and selling.
Innovation is not possible without unorthodox, out of the box thinking and experimentation and great leaders create a culture that encourages that. Part of creating an innovation culture is tolerating failures if not outright celebrating them along the way. Great leaders realize that learning is impossible without some degree of trial and error and can transform their failures into short-lived performance hiccups that are learning experiences on the long road to success.
The best leaders are humble, honest, pleasant, respectful, engaging, humorous and recognize that they need to treat others as they themselves would like to be treated or risk losing them along the way. They believe in and see the best in others and are consequently able to bring out the best in them and inspire them to ever higher aspirations.
When it comes to loyalty, an overwhelming 90% of professionals in the MENA region as polled by Bayt.com consider themselves loyal to their employer. To motivate others to stay the course and keep up morale, the best leaders are unwavering in their commitment to their mission, vision and values and their confidence in their cause. Whether than means pulling up their sleeves and getting into the micro essentials in the trenches or retrenching and gracefully reconsolidating the troops after a failure or fall, they are in it for the long haul and their loyalty and steadfastness is unfaltering and undisputed.
