Leadership Traits and your Business

This blog title may sound a bit odd, but I ran across an interesting survey today. There was a question posted on the Internet asking what leadership trait is the most important. I thought that was a good question, especially in reference to running your own business. What leadership trait do you think is the most important?

The choices for this particular survey included 'Forward-looking', 'Competent', 'Intelligent', 'Honest' and 'Inspiring'. All of these are something people should be looking for in a business leader, but the big question is what do most people (i.e. your customers) find the most important trait? Before I provide the survey results, let's look at the choices that were provided. If you are not 'Forward-Looking' as a leader, how can you lead your business into the future? People may follow you if you introduced a cutting-edge product into the market. You may also have found a service that has not been provided to the customer base yet. There are many strengths to a 'forward-looking' leader, this type of business leader will move their company into the future successfully.

The next choice was 'Competent'. Who in their right mind would follow someone who was not competent? That trait seems obvious, but, if you think about it, there are many incompetent people out there that are extremely capable to lead people, it may be the wrong direction, but they can lead people... You don't necessarily have to be 'competent' to lead, if people are inspired to follow you, competence or not, they will follow you. 'Intelligent' is also a very important leadership trait. But, how would you define intelligence? Intelligent for one, may not be that intelligent for someone else. We don't wear our IQ's on our sleeves, nor do we put it on our business cards. I have met some very intelligent people who couldn't reason themselves out of a paper bag...

Next on the list is 'Honest'. Now that is another interesting trait to have in a leader. You always want to do business with an honest person. But, like intelligence, how do you know the business leader is honest? The best way to determine honesty is by asking others who have worked with this potential leader. Honesty in a leader gives customers the comfort of knowing that they are not going to be taken advantage of. The last trait on the list is 'Inspiring'. One definition of a leader is one who inspires people to follow, not one who forces people to follow. So, you would expect that 'Inspiring' would be the most important leadership trait in business.

Somewhat surprisingly, the survey concluded that 'Honesty' was the most important trait, taking 45.7% of the responses. This result does make sense, especially in the current times. How many people do you know that have been lied to by someone they did business with? How many of those people really got hurt by the lies or the misleading? I can see why Honesty is currently considered one of the most important leadership traits. The second place trait was 'Inspiring' with 39.6% of the respondents choosing this. The remaining traits in order of importance for this survey are 'Competent', 'Forward-Looking' and then 'Intelligence'.

This type of survey is very helpful in keeping us focused on the traits that customer's are looking for in a business leader. If you want to stay in front of the trends, it is always good to keep an eye on what your customers are looking for and then provide what they want better than your competition.

Until tomorrow...