The five must–have leadership traits

source:http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20131230-five-must-have-management-skills

These days in business, there is one thing all managers need to know: forget what you used

to know about being a manager.

Gone are the days when middle management was expected to lead troops into some territorial

battle with rivals. Disregard the old command-culture favoured in the ‘80s. Abandon that tired

business school mantra about always seeming to be the smartest one in the room.These days,

it’s about collaborating, listening and treating more junior employees as equals. The prevailing

culture for successful businesses now is a management structure that is flat, where the most

junior associate has a chance to develop the next big idea.

Don’t know how to get by in such a world? Here, then, are five things all managers need to

know to succeed in business today.

5. Trusting Workplaces Breed Creativity

The best leaders find a way to encourage creativity in their teams. Pulling that off begins by

dispelling the myth that some people just aren’t creative.

“Everybody has the ability to be creative in one way or another,” said executive coach Charles

Day with The Lookinglass, a management consultancy in New York City.

“The key is to figure out how to unlock it in your employees.”To help new ideas grow, be sure

employees have context. In other words, they should understand the overall goals of the

company. When a new idea fits the business strategy, be generous with the time allocated

to exploring it. Then be sure your more junior employees know they won’t be criticised for

trying a novel idea that fails.

Some companies foster inspiration by encouraging employees to try new creative outlets.

Computer design firm FiftyThree, based in New York City and Seattle, holds regular classes

to teach employees subjects such as fashion illustration. The company’s IT guy won’t be

designing dresses for the runway anytime soon, but the process helps employees to tap

into their imagination.

“It might seem strange to teach a bunch of engineers how to do fashion sketches,”

admitted FiftyThree, co-founder and chief executive officer Georg Petschnigg. “But creativity

happens when boundaries are crossed.”

4. Trust Your Intuition -- Sometimes

Within a generation, the concept of instinctive intuition has gone from quack science to a

proven strategy for success in business.

That’s in large part thanks to studies that show it’s best to rely on a gut feeling when you

need to make a quick decision. It’s especially true when you have extensive knowledge of a

subject.

“A lot of people think intuition is general purpose, but intuition is actually domain specific,”

said Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at City University of New York. “Intuition is

the result of your subconscious brain picking up on clues and hints and calculating the

situation for you, and that’s based solely on experience.”

Maybe one of the most famously intuitive leaders, Steve Jobs, often spoke of following

his heart. This helped Jobs green light two projects that seemed too risky back in

2001: iTunes and the iPod. It is more than just a gut feeling, however.

The lesson from Apple, Pigliucci said, is to follow-up snap decisions with meticulous

attention to detail.

“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition,” Jobs told the graduating class of

Stanford University in 2005. “They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Everything else is secondary.”

3. When to be Funny

Knowing when to use a joke can help disarm uncomfortable situations and help bosses build

real relationships with their employees.

However, jokes should never belittle a more junior employee or stray in to the realm of

off-colour humour. But a boss who can crack jokes at his own expense? That’s a good way to

lighten the mood.

At Zappos, a Nevada-based online shoe retailer, toy-gun wars regularly break out between

departments, and videos of employees oddly dressed and dancing on their desks often end up

onYouTube. All that joking around has made employees more loyal to the company and more

productive.“Any type of positive humour seems to improve job satisfaction,” said Jessica Mesmer

Magnus,associate professor of management at the Cameron School of Business at University of

North Carolina, Wilmington. “Humour shows that you’re a real person and that you can relate to

your employees on the same level.”

2. Trust in Delegation

It takes faith for managers to delegate important tasks, and it’s something few successfully

pull off.

The reason is simple: They often think they’re better equipped to do the work than their more

junior employees.

Instead, the key is to trust them with the difficult parts of the job. Let them succeed, with just

a few nudges and checks, workers will be more likely to work hard for you.

“At the end of the day, it’s all about trust and that willingness to be vulnerable,”said Matthew

Pearsall,assistant professor of organisational behaviour at the University of North Carolina’s

Kenan-Flagler Business School.

1. Top-Down Collaboration

Creating workplace collaboration isn’t as simple as just telling employees to work together.

Instead, managers must give their teams specific tools, then oversee how they are being used.

“We often tell people to work together, but we don’t tell them how,” said E Allan Lind, professor

of leadership at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, North Carolina. “First, we have to

be mindful that people working together is not a normal state of things.”

Managers must show how good ideas come out of working together. They must also

demonstrate that real collaboration equals innovation, and be on the watch for communication

breakdowns.

David Kelly, founder of the wildly successful design firm Ideo, is famous for asking a group of

people that have very little in common on their curriculum vitaes to solve a problem.

Sometimes it’s the data guy who comes up with the entirely new engineering solution or the

computer geek who figures out the best marketing strategy. For Ideo, this team approach

has helped the company create everything from airplane lavatory signs to the first computer

mouse.

Those meetings may lead to team members disagreeing. Within reason, that’s a good thing,

according to Lind.

“Conflict is like the fire in the firebox of an old steam engine,” Lind said. “You don’t want the

fire to get so hot that it gets out of the firebox, but you don’t want it to go out, either.”

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Question 1:Have you ever been a team leader ? Being a team leader is easy or not ?

Question 2: What features does a good team leader must possess in your opinion ?

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