{"id":3,"date":"2007-05-23T11:51:52","date_gmt":"2007-05-23T15:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/leadership\/2007\/05\/23\/leadership-traits\/"},"modified":"2010-08-18T08:59:51","modified_gmt":"2010-08-18T12:59:51","slug":"leadership-traits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/leadership-traits\/","title":{"rendered":"Leadership Traits"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the more common ways to study leadership is to look at the traits leaders exhibit and try to determine which ones most contribute to their leadership ability.\u00a0 The authors of The Leadership Challenge took a slightly different approach and studied the traits that people most look for\u00a0 in someone they are willing to follow.\u00a0 The resulting list of traits aren&#8217;t necessarily things that will make you a skilled leader, but they are things that will help you attract followers&#8211;a very important component of <a href=\"http:\/\/leadership.w9z.org\">leadership<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The top five <a href=\"http:\/\/www.leadership501.com\/five-most-important-leadership-traits\/27\/\">leadership qualities<\/a> they identified are:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Honesty<\/li>\n<li>Forward-looking<\/li>\n<li>Inspiring<\/li>\n<li>Competent<\/li>\n<li>Intelligent<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>A leader who is struggling and having a hard time getting people to follow would be wise to study these traits and look for areas to improve.\u00a0 While actually making an improvement to any of these areas is difficult but achievable goal, most leaders will see a significant gain simply by improving their ability to display these <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bluskypedia.com\/Leadership_qualities\">leadership traits<\/a>.\u00a0 This assumes that they already possess each trait to a degree.\u00a0 Focusing on improving their display of each trait will help attract followers and will usually have a side effect of actually improving their proficiency in each trait simply by giving it more attention.<\/p>\n<p>The problem that many newly minted leaders run into is that they don&#8217;t understand the difference between leading and driving. Leadership isn&#8217;t just about forcing people to do what you want.\u00a0 It is about getting them to do it willingly.\u00a0 If you are only able to lead in the context of having a heavy stick to wield you aren&#8217;t actually a leader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the more common ways to study leadership is to look at the traits leaders exhibit and try to determine which ones most contribute to their leadership ability.\u00a0 The authors of The Leadership Challenge took a slightly different approach and studied the traits that people most look for\u00a0 in someone they are willing to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions\/15"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}