Top Leadership Qualities Of Highly Effective Leaders

Today, we hear a lot about leadership. Leadership is an integral part of a successful franchise operation. A great leader can spell the difference between a wildly successful business and one that just bumps along. So what are the leadership qualities that make you a better leader?

If you’ve ever wondered about this, you are not alone. Fortunately, great leaders can be made rather than born, and more effective franchise leadership is as simple as knowing and implementing today’s most compelling leadership qualities.

In this blog, we’ll discuss traits that make great leaders and why they’re essential in business.

Why Leadership Matters

Think leadership is just a fancy corporate buzzword? Think again. Recent polls by Gallup show that a massive 24% of employees are disengaged from their roles because of poor management within the company.

This disengagement results in less productive and profitable teams, more turnover, and a decreased company reputation. Bad leaders also cost their organizations by increasing the potential for employees to become burned out. Gallup research suggests that in June 2021, 74% of employees said they sometimes experienced burnout on the job, and burned-out employees are 23% more likely to visit the emergency room.

Fortunately, effective leadership skills can save the day. Companies under effective leadership enjoy higher employee retention, more customer satisfaction, and improved productivity, to name a few benefits.

5 Leadership Qualities Of Highly Effective Leaders

Become a more effective leader for your team by cultivating these leadership traits:

Influence

Great leaders influence others and exercise authority. Early in your leadership career, this may mean you’re the go-to person within your company about a particular topic. Later in your career, it may mean articulating the direction you believe the company should head.

The ability to influence is important because it affects other people’s behavior, builds a sense of expertise within your company, and generates a sense of trust between you and your colleagues.

The catch? Only people who are true experts can be influential and trustworthy. With this in mind, spend some time now boning up on your essential skills, understanding your business’s resources and value props, and positioning yourself as an authority.

Communication and Transparency

A company needs a high degree of trust in its leader to run well. To build trust, leaders need to be transparent. Instead of hiding a company’s challenges, goals, and bottlenecks, great leaders turn toward their teams with open communication to establish collaborative solutions to drive company success.

Open communication happens in a team when its members are empowered to share their thoughts without any fear of repercussions. It’s a cultural trait that teams cultivate with practice. Open communication helps build trust in the organization and sows the seeds of transforming employees into co-entrepreneurs. In addition to solving problems more effectively, this approach generates employee engagement. Leaders can encourage open communication with their teams by welcoming participation, active listening, asking questions, using ideas and suggestions, and acknowledging their contribution.

That said, there is a limit to how transparent a leader can be while being effective. Too much transparency can leave employees feeling overwhelmed and vulnerable, so it’s essential to establish and maintain healthy boundaries that encourage collaboration while also maintaining role structure.

Integrity

Did you know that today’s employees value integrity more than almost anything else? In fact, a recent survey found that 75% of employees see integrity as the most crucial attribute of a potential leader.

With this in mind, building your integrity, moral standards, and accountability is critical to be an effective leader. In short, employees want to know that their leaders will do the right thing, even when nobody’s watching. Honesty and dependability are two key leadership traits. So follow through and keep your word.

They want to work within companies that distribute power and decision-making responsibilities and focus on the well-being of every player. As a leader, your job is cultivating an environment that curates those qualities and puts employees at ease.

Decisiveness

In a leadership role, there’s very little room to waffle back and forth about what’s the right decision and what’s not. Instead, you need to be able to make decisions and stick with them unless there’s a valid and pressing reason to do something different.

As a leader, this means developing your ability to act decisively, evaluate your decisions continuously, and pivot when needed. The better you get at these skills, the more effective you’ll be as a leader.

Resilience

The majority of highly effective leaders have a lot of perseverance and tenacity. Leadership and failure go hand-in-hand. There’s no way to separate them, nor would you truly want to. Being a leader means making decisions that may end in failure. It’s what you do after that failure that matters.

Instead of trying to avoid failure or crumbling when it happens, great leaders must take ownership and accept responsibility for decisions, maintain a sense of optimism, and focus on creating new courses of action that prevent existing problems from escalating or becoming more damaging.

Bonus Leadership Trait: Innovation

The best leaders know when to take risks and when to innovate. After all, great leaders lead by example and create companies with a culture of innovation and creativity.

This means encouraging employees to be creative, share ideas, experiment, and embrace mistakes.

When you practice these skills within the confines and structure of your organization, you succeed in building a company that is more agile, competitive, and in demand than its competitors.

Knowing Your Strengths as a Leader

To become a more effective leader, you should know that it doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, developing excellent leadership skills is an ongoing process that requires you to know your strengths now and understand how to capitalize on them as time goes on.

The more honest you can be about your performance as an individual contributor, the better-equipped you’ll be to build new skills in yourself and generate excellence in your team and organization.

Looking for a franchise opportunity that loves to support and encourage strong leaders? Look no further than Alloy.

Offering a step-by-step system that’s proven to work, a team of experts to support you as you establish and grow your franchise, and a business model that allows you to run the company of your dreams, Alloy is here to help you become the best leader possible, starting right now.

Not a business owner yet, but considering taking the leap this year? Click here to learn about Alloy Franchise Opportunities and find out whether they’re right for you.