I have been working through an article from Forbes.com this summer that listed the top 10 qualities that make a great leader.
They were:
- Honesty
- The Ability to Delegate
- Communication
- A sense of Humour
- Confidence
- Commitment
- Positive attitude
- Creativity
- Intuition
- The Ability to Inspire
I thought it might be interesting to look back at the activity on each posting and see which ones interested my readers the most.
Before I hit the statistics page of my web site, I looked at this list and thought through my top 10 list.
For me, the key to leadership success has to lie in the word ‘communication’. A recent review by the Schulich Executive Education Centre in Toronto suggests that the top two requirements in senior management education were leadership and communication. If you do not have a good strong ‘communication engine’ within the organization and at the top of the organization you put everyone and everything at risk.
A strong ‘communication engine’ ensures that everyone is in the loop; that misunderstandings are minimized; that key stakeholders are kept aware; that employees know where they are going and why; and the list goes on. So much of what we see that goes wrong in today’s organizations can be attributed to poor communications.
So I think the most important leadership trait is communication. A great leader needs to be a great communicator and needs to encourage strong communications throughout.
Which blog posts this summer attracted the most interest from my readers? Note that this is not necessarily the trait that my readers thought most important – just most interesting and thus the most read.
The results (percentage of total hits):
| The Ability to Delegate | 16.72% |
| Confidence | 15.74% |
| A sense of Humour | 15.49% |
| Communication | 8.70% |
| Creativity | 8.33% |
| Positive attitude | 8.27% |
| Honesty | 7.96% |
| The Ability to Inspire | 6.74% |
| Intuition | 6.12% |
| Commitment | 5.94% |
If you see a blog post cross your desk on a Wednesday around 2pm, what is going to attract you to read it? If the post were about something you knew well and were good at, would you open it? Nope. But if it were on a topic that promised to fill a gap or help you as a leader in some way you would open it.
So from these numbers I would suggest that the leadership trait that most interested us and that possibly we felt most in need of understanding better is the ability to delegate. This makes sense. I think leaders do have a hard time at this. We so often think we can do it better or faster if we just do it ourselves. This is especially true of new leaders or middle management leaders. Giving up the reigns is hard. And it is good news that many of us know that this is an issue. Of all the posts around the Forbes.com list of Top Ten Leadership Traits, this is the one you open the most.
If you haven’t read it, have a look.. https://www.davidbarrett.ca/key-leadership-trait-2-ability-delegate/.
