Leadership's vital Attributes

All great leaders have several typical attributes that they have developed along their leadership journey. I like to refer to them as the four A's of great leadership. These common factors are: Appearance, Attitude, Aggressiveness and Action.

Appearance is vital many people sum up their business partners, clients and friends on the first impression. Take a look at most great leaders and in their own way you will see they have the appearance of looking good and importantly looking as they are in control.

Attitude, have you got the right attitude, focusing in on the outcome and working steadily until you get there. Do you spread your attitude to your team to stay positive and keep working through all the issues to get the product and service just right.

Aggressiveness, are you ready to move forward as soon as you can see some advantage, with this type of aggressiveness you can seize the moment and maximize your output.

Action, of all the leadership traits taking action is the one that gets you the best value, people around you can see your action and will want to follow you to be part of the action.

Although it seems simple if you can maintain and improve your four A's of leadership, you will find that your team members will be keen to improve their efforts and be part of the winning combination.

Leaders develop Followers

As a leader is it critical you have followers. A leader with no followers is unable to harness the power of teamwork to amplify their ideas and elevate the cause.

Maybe its time for you to take stock, for some cultures this is hard to do as we have been brought up to be modest about our own ideas and achievements yet lavish in the praise we dish out to those around us.

But lets see through this for a moment, have you sat down and taken a personal inventory of your strengths as a leader? Have you critically looked at the members of your team and worked out why they continue to follow you. Sure, some are forced too because the work hierarchy have placed them under you, but when you look carefully you will see the other members around who follow your lead.

Take each of these people and consider what it is that you bring to the table to keep them in your team. Perhaps its your abilities in planning, delegation, decision making, technical competence, communication just as a small sample list. One of the most sort after skills is a leaders ability to deal with people, you hear of it time and time again, we wish we had a leader who could deal with the people in the team to keep their focus and lead them through tough times while continually developing them to meet tomorrow's challenges.

By taking stock of your great leadership abilities it allows you some observations, firstly you have a list of skills that others see in you, and also it gives you some ideas on areas for improvement.

With luck this simple exercise will show you some of your strengths as a leader that you can be proud of!

So how can we work further on this? your strengths are areas you should identify to develop in the people around you. If you are strong in these areas then chances are you have a great skill that you can share to develop in your followers. By giving freely of your skills, you will further strengthen and develop these relationships as your team members will quickly see there is something extra in it for them - learning a valuable skill from their leader.