What Makes a Good Leader? A More Useful Place to Begin

When you ask what makes a good leader, you will usually receive a familiar list: integrity, empathy, confidence, resilience and vision. These qualities all matter and few people would disagree. But a list cannot tell us what good leadership looks like in a particular organisation, at a particular moment, with a particular group of people.

A leader guiding an experienced team through uncertainty may need to create space rather than provide answers. Someone taking responsibility for a struggling function may initially need to offer much more direction. A leader introducing a new operating model needs to help people understand not only what is changing, but what the change will require from them.

The same behaviour will not be equally useful in every situation. A better starting point is therefore not simply asking ‘What makes a good leader?’ It is:

What does this situation require, and can the leader recognise and respond to it?

Start with what leaders need to make possible

Descriptors of what good leadership looks like remain largely meaningless until they are connected to the actual work.

What must leaders make possible for the organisation to succeed? Do they need to bring previously separate teams together? Encourage experimentation while maintaining accountability? Help people grow into roles that ask something substantially different of them?

The answers should shape how leadership is defined, assessed and developed. Otherwise, organisations risk promoting capable people into more senior roles while leaving them to interpret vague expectations for themselves.

Good leadership therefore begins before the individual leader. It begins with the organisation becoming clear about what its strategy requires from those responsible for delivering it.

Self-awareness becomes useful when it shapes action

Once the requirements are clearer, leaders need to understand what they bring to them.

This includes strengths, but not only strengths. It also refers to motives, values, emotional triggers and our subconscious responses under pressure. A leader may be naturally decisive, thoughtful, persuasive or highly attuned to relationships. Each quality can be valuable. Each can also become limiting when used without enough awareness.

Decisiveness can close down discussion too early. Empathy can make a necessary conversation easier to postpone. Strategic thinking can create distance from immediate realities. A strong sense of responsibility can prevent other people from taking ownership.

This is why a leadership assessment should not end with a description of personality. Its purpose is not to tell someone who they are. It is to help them recognise the choices they tend to make, understand how others may experience those choices and decide what the situation asks them to do differently.

Research reinforces the need to look beyond traits alone. A set of comprehensive meta-analyses found that leaders’ behaviours explained more variation in effectiveness than their traits, while also showing that the two are connected. Who leaders are matters, but what they do with it matters more (DeRue et al., 2011).

Even strengths need judgement

We tend to think of strengths as qualities to use more. Leadership is rarely that simple.

The ability to influence can become a need to win every argument. High standards can make it difficult for others to contribute work that is still developing. Calmness under pressure can be experienced as distance. A leader’s greatest strength may be exactly what the organisation needs, and still create unintended consequences when it becomes their default response.

The point is not to become less decisive, empathetic or ambitious. It is to develop more choice. Leaders need to recognise when a familiar strength is helping, when it is being overused and when another response would serve the situation better.

This is where self-awareness becomes practical. It moves from knowing one’s strengths to exercising judgement about how and when to use them.

Adapting does not have to mean becoming someone else

Some leaders resist changing their approach because it feels inauthentic. They might think that ‘it is simply not who I am’ or worry that adapting their behaviour means performing a role.

But authenticity and adaptability are not opposites.

A leader can remain anchored in the same values while expressing them differently. Respect might mean listening patiently in one situation and confronting avoidance in another. Empathy may call for reassurance, but it may also require an honest message that someone would prefer not to hear. Confidence can mean setting a clear direction or acknowledging that other people know more.

Authenticity is not behaving in the same way regardless of context. It is maintaining coherence between values, intentions and actions.

The more clearly leaders understand that distinction, the more freedom they have to respond deliberately rather than habitually.

A leader’s impact is visible in what others can do

Leadership is often evaluated through the visible qualities of the person at the front: how confidently they speak, how compellingly they communicate or how quickly they decide.

A more revealing test is to look at what happens around them.

Do people understand what matters and why? Can they question an assumption without being dismissed? Do they know where they have room to act and where alignment is essential? Are different perspectives used to improve decisions or solely invited as a gesture? Can the team perform without remaining dependent on the leader?

This does not mean that good leaders are endlessly accommodating or universally liked. Helping people contribute also requires standards, boundaries and difficult decisions. The aim is not to create constant comfort. It is to create the clarity and conditions people need to direct their effort towards work that matters and take meaningful responsibility for it.

Three questions worth returning to

There is no single leadership style that works everywhere. Nor is there a finished state in which someone has acquired all the characteristics of a great leader.

Good leadership is an ongoing act of judgement that is lived in every moment of the day. Rather than asking whether they possess the right qualities, leaders might ask:

• What must become possible through my leadership now?

• What does this situation need more (and less) of from me?

• What might I not be seeing and whose perspective could help me see it?

The strongest leaders do not always have the answer. They do, however, develop the self-awareness to recognise their own patterns, the curiosity to understand what is happening around them and the flexibility to respond with intention.

That is what turns leadership from a collection of desirable qualities into something useful: a way of helping people and organisations move forward together.

Sources

Derue, D. S., Nahrgang, J. D., Wellman, N. E., & Humphrey, S. E. (2011). Trait and behavioral theories of leadership: An integration and meta‐analytic test of their relative validity. Personnel Psychology, 64(1), 7-52.