Nobody is born a leader, leadership is a skill that can be developed.

The good thing about leadership qualities is, they can be learned by practising reputation.

Leaders have vision, they can see into the future, they have a clear idea of where they are going and what they are trying to accomplish.

The difference between a leader and a manager is this, a manager gets the job done while great leaders tap into the emotions of their employees.

In this post, we will look at the 8 leadership qualities you need to equip yourself with to succeed in your career 

1. Humility

This is a great quality of a leader. Leaders are those who are strong and decisive but also humble, they are modest in their actions. Humility doesn’t mean you are weak or not confident of yourself.

Humility means you have the self-confidence and awareness to recognise the value of others and without feeling threatened. 

It means you are able to admit to your team that you are not perfect and can also make mistakes. 

It means you can give credit to whoever deserves it. for example, recognising a team member who performed a task excellently. 

2. Courage

Having courage means you can take risks in the achievement of your goals with no assurance for success. Life is full of uncertainty so every commitment you make or every action you take entails a risk of some kind.

3. Networking 

Networking is extremely important in leadership because if you are not networking, growth becomes difficult to attain.  Experts agree that success has a direct link to your networking skill.

You need to learn to network with people not only in your company or industry. You need to learn to connect to the right people. These people may be in different fields, companies or industries. Leaders network with people inside and outside of their company or industry

4. Delegation

Being a leader doesn’t mean you have to be the one to perform every task, you need to learn to delegate those tasks to your team members. 

You should know that there are people in the team that may be able to perform a specific task better than you can, try to tap into every of your team members strength. 

When delegating tasks to your team members, it doesn’t need to be in an aggressive or commanding way and it doesn’t also need to be too passive or too soft. 

The best way to delegate is to do it in an assertive and confident manner.

5. Communication

Communication is vital to leadership, it is a skill that you need to learn and constantly improve on. 

As a leader, you communicate to give information, motivate and inspire, show empathy and collaborate. There are several purposes behind our communication which implies that we need to learn different styles of communication.

To be good at communication, identify an area of your communication that you need to work on, look for resources that can help you develop that skill, these resources can be books, video and audio courses, podcasts etc.

6. Motivate and influence

Being a leader comes with the responsibility of empowering your team so they can perform to the best of their ability. 

Your duty as a leader is to come up with goals and visions for your team. It is important to motivate and inspire them to move towards that goal.

If you don’t motivate and inspire your team to move towards the goals that you’ve set, it becomes difficult and would take a longer time to reach the goal.

7. Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand others’ wants, needs and concerns. As a leader, you need to be aware of the environment around your team, how are they impacted by certain issues or events happening around them. 

Try to understand why their performance is poor rather than commending them to do a better job or deciding to replace them. 

Understand why they may have difficulty completing their tasks, this is important because there could be some things happening around them or a challenge in their personal life that is making them not to be able to complete a task that they normally would have completed. 

Try to show interest and concern for your team because it would help you earn their trust and respect. 

8. Integrity 

Integrity is an important quality of a leader, it helps you earn the trust of your team members and people around you. 

Integrity has its foundation in truthfulness, it requires that you always tell the truth at all times and in every situation.

In some circumstances, it may be difficult to tell your team members the truth, for example, if the company is going bankrupt, you might not feel it’s important to tell your team members because you don’t want them to panic, but it’s best to inform them of the current situation. 

They may have great ideas that can help solve the problem at hand and it would help them trust you better.

Truthfulness is a major ingredient for the success of anything you are doing.

Now I’d love to hear from you

What other essential leadership quality would you recommend?

Let me know by leaving a comment below right now.