Effective leaders: What competencies and characteristics do they have?
Effective leaders should give their employees support and orientation, and also be motivating and inspiring role models for them. But they can only fulfill this leader function if they themselves are mature personalities.
What are the characteristics of effective leaders? Many books have been written about this, because: Regardless of whether employees are support staff or highly qualified specialists, or whether their company is currently going through a crisis or a successful phase, managers need certain characteristics or competencies in order to be genuine, i.e. effective, leaders.
- Ownership: This includes, among other things: setting challenging goals for oneself, sustainably implementing corporate goals, developing creative space, identifying priorities, communicating intentions consistently and clearly, generating solutions and putting them into action, creating realities.
- Self-orientation: This includes, among other things: being self-aware, asserting oneself in one's environment, taking a stand even on sensitive issues, dealing confidently with new and unknown things, having a broad, flexible repertoire of actions for differentiated situations, a clearly developed sense of personal values.
- Entrepreneurship: This includes, among other things: developing and driving the business, the will to succeed, sensitivity to market signals and early recognition of business opportunities, thinking through and managing products, processes and behavior consistently from the customer's point of view, the ability and courage to break new ground if necessary.
- Ability to effect behavior: This includes, among other things: Creating meaning and generating understanding, communicating credibly and authentically, mobilizing willingness to perform, having an encouraging effect on others, feeling for the effective forces in the organizational structure and recognizing the decisive leverage forces, creating clear responsibilities and transparent task structures in order to make others successful.
- Successful relationship management: This includes, among other things: A convincing demeanor and open approach to others, the ability to shape relationships cooperatively and develop interfaces conducively, the ability to network and deal with heterogeneous interests, the ability to move effectively within the social organizational structure.
- Emotional stability: This includes, among other things: Confidence in one's own abilities, remaining calm and reliable in stressful situations, understanding one's own and others' feelings and being able to respond to them, being able to deal with disappointments while remaining capable of taking action, demonstrating appropriate conflict resolution behavior.
- Willingness to learn and develop: This includes, among other things: learning from experience, accepting challenging situations and seizing the opportunities they present, obtaining and processing feedback on one's own impact, acting with an eye to the future, developing a pioneering spirit, nurturing talent and developing employees by being tolerant of mistakes, providing support in the event of difficulties (coaching), but being consistent when performance is lacking.
The challenge is to continuously develop these leadership qualities - especially in a time characterized by rapid change and decreasing predictability.
To the author: Hans-Peter Machwürth is Managing Director of the internationally operating training and consulting company Machwürth Team International (MTI Consultancy), Visselhövede (D). www.mticonsultancy.com
(Visited 709 times, 1 visits today)
