Successful leaders are those who can navigate uncertainty, drive innovation, and build high-performing, happy teams. They are empathetic, self-aware, visionary, and—in today’s world—equipped with the skills to harness the power of technology to drive results.
But how do you become a great leader? What are the actions you can take to cultivate leadership skills?
The Behavioral Theory of Leadership states that by learning a specific set of leadership behaviors, you can build the skills and competence to become an exemplary leader yourself.
In this article, we’ll cover leadership behaviors that you can study and internalize in your quest to become an effective leader who inspires and influences people.
15 Leadership Behaviors to Be an Effective Leader
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat are Leadership Behaviors
Leadership behaviors are a combination of characteristics, practices, conduct, or management styles that make you an influential leader. Qualities such as empathy, good communication skills, resilience, integrity, confidence, courage, delegation abilities, and mentorship are collectively called leadership behaviors.
Other common leadership behaviors in the workplace include the ability to inspire employees, boost employee engagement and retention, promote employee development, motivate teams to work toward a shared vision, and drive overall success and growth.
The key attributes of leadership behaviors are:
1. Empathy
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, says, “Empathy makes you a better innovator.”
To work with people of diverse backgrounds, capabilities, and cultures, you should be considerate of others’ feelings and understand their needs. Empathy goes a long way in establishing team trust and building a positive work environment.
2. Motivation
Motivated leaders create motivated teams. This means great leaders should be highly motivated themselves and posses the ability to galvamize team members to achieve ambitious goals with focus and dedication.
Motivating your team requires meaningful engagement and positive reinforcement so that team members can drive results and achieve real breakthroughs.
This quality carries even more weight in a crisis, when there’s a need to either change an organization’s culture or motivate the troops to maintain a confident outlook.
3. Confidence
As they say, the real test of leadership happens when you hit rough waters; when you need to encourage the team and make tough decisions without succumbing to the circumstances. This confidence is what inspires others, making them believe in you and finding resilience within themselves.
Let’s understand how leadership behaviors influence team productivity and morale:
- Builds a positive work culture: Nobody likes walking into an office that’s mired in politics or lacks camaraderie. Ensure teamwork and collaboration helps all members work together as a unit, and everyone feels valued and supported. This increases job satisfaction, confidence and authenticity at the workplace and creates a healthy work environment
- Encourages growth and development: Encourage employees to upskill and constantly provide constructive feedback to help them achieve their personal goals along with organizational goals
- Improves communication: Present your views with clarity and encourage open communication to improve team productivity and resolve issues quickly. This also means accepting negative feedback when it comes your way
- Promotes innovation and change: Adaptive leadership is one of the core values of a strong business culture. Teams with effective leadership embrace change and creativity. They are flexible and willing to adapt to changing times, which leads to continuous improvement and innovation within the organization
Summarize this article for me please15 Leadership Behaviors That Define Successful Leaders
A command-and-control approach to leadership can interfere with your ability to be an effective leader. Instead, adopt a leadership approach based on learning, agility, collaboration, and empowerment. Let’s see the top 15 leadership behaviors you should acquire to grow as a leader:
1. Adaptability
The modern business environment is constantly evolving. Your employees have different expectations and goals. Your customers seek more value, competition is increasing, technology is advancing—the list is endless.
So, adaptability is the need of the hour for leaders. You should be able to adjust your leadership style, learnings, approaches, and strategies based on the situation instead of blindly following traditional methods.
Adaptability helps you make strategic decisions and handle setbacks better, turning challenges into opportunities. Here’s what you should remember to practice adaptability:
2. Self-motivation/discipline
A survey by the Center for Creative Leadership shows that self-motivation/self-discipline is the most important leadership competency today. Leadership is a position of both power and responsibility. To set a great example for your team and build a positive environment, you should achieve your goals, show commitment and resilience, and hold yourself to high integrity standards.
Discipline helps you persevere and inspire the people on your team to take on challenges. Plus, it helps you maintain focus on the goals and make strategic decisions.
3. Goal setting
One of the core responsibilities of a leader is to help an organization succeed. Goal setting provides a roadmap to success, making it a key leadership attribute. Great leaders provide a clear direction and a sense of purpose to the team members, constantly coaxing them towards a defined objective.
Goal setting is crucial for organizational growth and the individual growth of your team members. By tracking goal progress, you can assess individual performance and capabilities and motivate your team members to be the best versions of themselves.
So, to achieve those moonshots, set visionary goals that encourage innovation and excellence.
Achieve bigger goals with meticulous planning. Try the ClickUp SMART Goals Template to define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives for your team. The template helps you break down complex goals into smaller tasks to ensure consistent progress. Use it to visualize your team’s progress and identify any bottlenecks.
4. Self-awareness
Self-awareness is one of the biggest leadership strengths linked directly to emotional intelligence. Knowing and acknowledging your strengths and shortcomings, skills and personality, and how they impact the people around you is what makes you powerful.
Effective leaders have a strong understanding of their own emotions and understand the emotions of those around them. A key aspect of self-aware leaders is also their ability to introspect and observe themselves and their teams objectively.
INFJ personality types are more intuitive in their decision-making than others because they typically have a high degree of self-awareness.
5. Planning and accountability
In his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey lists planning as the number one habit of successful leaders.
Effective leadership means having a clear vision. But to execute that vision and realize that dream, you need exceptional planning skills. A plan must have long-term, medium-term, and short-term goals and the steps needed to reach them.
Taking accountability for the plan and its outcomes is something leaders must bear. Holding yourself accountable for your shortcomings—and those of your team—builds integrity and mutual respect.
6. Decision-making
A leader who can determine a clear course of action in any situation is more likely to seize opportunities and mitigate threats.
You should be able to gather relevant information swiftly, trust your instincts (which should be honed over time), and make informed decisions without getting bogged down by analysis paralysis.
A decisive leader increases their team’s efficiency and fuels innovation, especially when on a tight deadline or working towards an ambitious goal.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, says that there are two types of decisions: one-way doors (highly impactful and irreversible) and two-way doors (minor impact and reversible). You need to identify the situation and make decisions accordingly.
7. Effective communication
Effective communication is what sets good leaders apart from managers.
In ‘Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently,’ author John C. Maxwell explains that true leaders make the people around them feel heard, comfortable, and understood, which promotes trust and collaboration in the organization.
Communication as a team leadership skill is not just about exchanging ideas or words but connecting with team members, making them feel valued, and being able to relate to them. You also need to communicate vision, goals, and feedback clearly to ensure better team collaboration.
Try ClickUp’s Internal Communication Template to streamline internal communication and ensure a better flow of information among different departments. It helps you promote transparency by ensuring all team members get real-time updates for complete transparency. This template helps you:
- Optimize the process of creating and distributing internal communications
- Guarantee that employees can easily obtain the most up-to-date information
- Enhance employee involvement and foster a culture of collaboration
8. Emotional intelligence
While IQ and technical leadership skills are necessary to enter a managerial position, emotional intelligence is what helps grow from a manager to a leader.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your feelings as well as the feelings of those around you. Empathy, self-awareness, and compassion are some of the traits of emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence helps you give constructive feedback, collaborate with other employees on the team, and manage conflicts inside the workplace.
9. Open to feedback
Great leaders know the value of collective wisdom and seek feedback from their employees to improve their leadership strategies and skills.
Encourage your team to express their ideas and feedback honestly, even if that means acknowledging dissenting opinions or uncomfortable truths occasionally.
Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix defines this process of seeking feedback as ‘farming for dissent’.
But seeking feedback is not enough; you should also reflect on it, find areas for improvement, and create plans to implement the feedback.
Use ClickUp’s Employee Feedback Template to seek feedback from your team. Want to check whether your team is happy with your leadership style? Or need suggestions to improve the work environment? This template helps you gather relevant feedback from employees. The best part is that you can track your employees’ sentiments through powerful visualizations.
10. Task delegation
Management is an inherent part of leadership. A leader who is hesitant to delegate their tasks to the right people overburdens themselves and, in the long run, expends energy on the wrong type of work. By refusing to delegate, you also make your employees miss out on growth opportunities and learning, as you’re doing all the heavy lifting yourself.
That’s why learning how to delegate tasks is a vital leadership behavior. It allows you to focus on higher-value activities while your team members contribute to the organization’s growth using their unique and specific skillsets.
11. Conflict resolution
Remember the old stick analogy for unity? A single stick can be broken easily, but a bundle is powerful. That’s exactly how a team functions—working together makes you resilient and a force to reckon with.
The best way to assess team leadership skills is to look for team cohesiveness—the ability to bring the entire team together as a unit. This means resolving conflicts when they (inevitably) arise and making team members aware of their synergies and complementary skills rather than their differences.
Exceptional leaders are experts at conflict management and have strong problem-solving skills. To build this leadership behavior, practice effective communication, listen to all parties attentively, and find unique ways to balance everyone’s interests.
12. Honesty
Effective leadership is a combination of many different leadership qualities, but honesty comes first as a trait of great leadership. It means being open and transparent to your team with your thoughts and feelings related to a task or situation.
It also means encouraging candor and free expression (within respectable bounds) within your team.
When you display honesty in your actions, team members respect you and are more willing to work together to achieve their objectives. Moreover, it builds a relationship of trust and support before they invest their energies in achieving your vision as a leader.
13. Creativity
In an innovation-driven economy, the ability to generate a flow of great ideas and original concepts in diverse situations has become a benchmark for effective leadership behavior.
In leadership, creativity means being open-minded about diverse business problems and enthusiastically embracing market shifts and changing circumstances. A good leader can adopt fresh and unconventional thinking during a crisis and motivate their employees to do the same.
Creativity drives long-term growth, enhances products and services, and ensures your organization stays ahead of the competition in the market.
Although creativity is a collective effort, it begins with the leader participating in brainstorming sessions and encouraging employees to take calculated risks with unwavering commitment.
💡 Pro tip: Conduct exciting and fruitful brainstorming sessions with your team using ClickUp Whiteboards. They act as the perfect canvas to share ideas, add notes, integrate tasks, and brainstorm strategies. You can also create tasks directly from Whiteboards to promote ownership.
14. Confidence
Confidence is one of the foundational qualities of an aspiring leader in an organization. Self-confident leaders deal with conflicts and problems without getting stressed and anxious and letting it damage their self-esteem. You can cultivate confidence with discipline, working on your core competencies relentlessly, and achieving higher goals.
15. Empathy
One of the most crucial leadership attributes is understanding others’ feelings and needs. Empathy allows leaders to develop strong interpersonal relationships and build deep trust with their team, regardless of shared experiences and backgrounds.
What empathy means is to feel a genuine interest in others’ experiences. And then step into other people’s shoes to listen and respond to their problems thoughtfully.
This creates a safe space and a healthy work environment for employees, where they feel cared for. Empathetic leadership also increases team productivity and fosters innovation.
Summarize this article for me pleaseImplementing Leadership Behaviors in the Real World
Understanding the theory behind leadership behaviors is one thing. Putting them into practice is quite another.
Here are some actionable steps to integrate leadership behaviors into your everyday actions.
- Self-assessment: Start with identifying your strengths and weaknesses. This can help you find the skills you lack and pinpoint areas of improvement. Build a targeted plan to enhance your leadership skills
You can use ClickUp’s Self Evaluation Form Template to reflect on your performance and find growth opportunities. Once you have relevant insights, connect with your mentor or supervisor to seek suggestions for career advancement and leadership skill development.
- Choose specific leadership skills: The stepping stone to leadership is selecting the right management style based on your personality type. For example, if you gain energy from social interaction, you should learn more about how to improve ENTP leadership style
- Seek mentorship: Seek out industry experts or leadership coaches who have the necessary experience and expertise in your field. You can ask them to evaluate your plans and guide your leadership behavior
- Continuous learning: Leadership is always a work in progress. You need to follow a cycle of self-assessment, learning, unlearning, and implementing feedback. What can make this process smooth is reading leadership books and attending leadership training courses
How ClickUp makes implementing leadership behaviors easier
Leadership can often be a lonely journey because of the shift in power dynamics and the weight of decision-making power on your shoulders. However, you can tackle this journey with team collaboration and support.
Using management and productivity solutions like ClickUp can help here. ClickUp is an all-in-one project platform that helps you connect with your team, delegate tasks, set goals, visualize progress, view bottlenecks, seek feedback, and even brainstorm with your team.
Let’s see how you can use ClickUp to adopt leadership behaviors.
Improve communication
Open and effective communication sets the foundation for effective leadership, and ClickUp Chat helps you with that. It simplifies connecting with your team members by bringing all resources, conversations, projects, and links together in one place.
You can communicate with your team in real time by initiating conversations using @mentions. To avoid any confusion, add project links, docs, videos, and web pages easily within the context of work tasks.
Delegate tasks
Creating and delegating tasks and informing team members about the same takes too much time.
ClickUp Tasks makes this process efficient and hassle-free. You can easily create and delegate tasks, categorize them into different groups, and use custom tags for easy identification.
If you’re handling multiple teams or projects, you can link related and dependent tasks to promote collaboration and ownership.
Set and track goals
Once tasks are assigned, you need to ensure everyone is on track with the deliverables.
ClickUp Goals is the perfect tool to promote accountability by setting clear timelines and automating goal tracking. You can create targets to monitor progress and weekly scorecards to analyze your team’s performance.
Keep track of everything
Tracking every action item for your team can be overwhelming. ClickUp Views allow you to filter relevant information and get a high-level overview of everything that’s happening. This simplifies performance tracking and monitoring, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.
Manage teams efficiently
The core principle of leadership is bringing a team together, managing each member’s expectations, and aligning their individual goals toward a collective vision.
ClickUp’s Team Management Plan Template provides you with the direction to manage cross-functional teams. You can use it to assign tasks, plan projects, and set roles and responsibilities. This template helps you:
- Ensure teams are focused on the key factors for achieving success together
- Organize and oversee projects with clear direction
- Effectively communicate responsibilities and tasks to team members
Simplify collaboration
Collaborate with your team using ClickUp Docs, the in-built document feature. You can use it to create checklists, guidelines, playbooks, strategies, project timelines, and more.
It helps you review and edit documents with your team in real time with collaboration detection, share instant feedback, and send out timely updates.
Summarize this article for me pleaseLearn and Implement Leadership Behaviors with ClickUp
Leadership is one of the most diverse concepts, and multiple theories define how it ought to be. It’s also an evolving concept, though many of the core attributes of great leaders remain unchanged. Irrespective of the leadership philosophy you follow, great leadership requires authenticity, courage, and of course, the ability to deliver results.
This requires strategic planning and a lot of hard work. ClickUp works as your ally in this journey. The all-in-one productivity platform helps you stay aligned with your team, ensure transparency, and achieve goals.
Sign up on ClickUp for free to improve team collaboration and make your leadership journey smoother!
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