The Top 10 Attributes Of Leaders
Are leaders "born" or can anyone learn to be a
leader? The best leadership training for
potential leaders should be the best training
about leadership - what is entailed in being a
leader, and what can go wrong, as well as what can
go right.
1. Leaders are persons who, by word and/or
personal example, markedly influence the
behaviors, thoughts, and/or feelings of a
significant number of their fellow beings,
followers, or audience. The leader's voices
affect their worlds, and ultimately, our world.
2. The key to leadership is the effective
communication of a story. The most fundamental
stories fashioned by leaders concern issues of
personal and group identify. Leaders who presume
to bring about major alterations across a
significant population must in some way help their
followers think through who they are.
3. Leaders embody those stories. They convey
their stories by the kinds of lives they
themselves lead and, through example, seek to
inspire in their followers.
4. The ways in which direct leaders conduct
their lives - their embodiments - must be clearly
perceptible by those whom they hope to influence.
People who do not practice what they preach are
hypocrites, and hypocrisy mutes the effectiveness
of their stories.
5. A leader is a holder of certain beliefs,
attitudes, and values, and is a practitioner of
certain behaviors. It is the responsibility of
the leader to help other individuals determine
their personal, social and moral codes. Leaders
inspire, in part, because of how they have
resolved their own identify issues.
6. The ordinary leader, by definition the most
common one, simply relates the traditional story
of his or her group as effectively as possible.
The innovation leader takes a story that has been
latent among the members of his or her chosen
domain and brings new attention or a fresh twist
to the story. The visionary leader actually
creates a new story, one not known to most
individuals before, and achieves at least a
measure of success in conveying this story
effectively to others. Moses, Confucius, Jesus,
Buddha, Mohammed were certainly this type of
leader. Gandhi and Monnet were visionary leaders
for our time.
7. The arena is which leadership occurs is the
human mind. The leader who would succeed, then,
is the one who best senses and delivers what an
audience already desires. The leader is the one
who most keenly senses the wishes of a potential
audience.
8. Most leaders have gifts in the realm of
personal intelligence. Nearly all are eloquent in
voice, and many are eloquent in writing as well.
They have a promising story and tell it
persuasively. A generous degree of linguistic
intelligence - the capacity to use words well, is
the markings of an effective communicator, and
perhaps, a promising leader.
Leaders have mastery of storytelling
9. A leader is never fully realized. The
relationship between the leader and the followers
is typically ongoing, active, and dynamic, one of
community. The leader must know her mind,
including her own changing thoughts, values and
strategies.
10. Leadership is never guaranteed; it must always
be renewed. Leaders succeed, fail, return and
recover, often many times in the course of a
career.
Submitted by Jo-Ann Sloan, who can be reached at
sloancoach@aol.com The original source is:
researching Leading Minds: An Anatomy of
Leadership by Howard Gardner. Copyright
1997-2007 by Coach U, all rights reserved.
