How to Become a Better Leader?
MIT’s article “How to become a better leader” is based on their research and in-depth conversation with more than 2,000 international executives. They found out that good leaders make it look easy, but in reality, they work hard on their personalities. One can demonstrate good leadership skills at every level and have to tweak their traits as they move up the hierarchy into new roles or environments. It’s important to balance out and have the right personality scores with these Big Five Personality trails: Need for stability, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Need for Stability: Emotional stability is important as it helps leaders to cope with stress, setbacks, and uncertainty. If you are too calm and composed, it can come across as uninspiring and if you show less resilience to stress it can cause great anxiety within the team. The best way would be to verbalize all the negative emotions, as words will dampen those feelings. Expressing your true feeling never make a leader look weak, they come across as confident and helps other better understand them.
Extraversion: People perceive executives who are extroverts to be leaderlike but most of the time they come across as too talkative or domineering. Being an introvert can make executives come across as cold and unapproachable. Good leaders are also good listens, as it allows more space for team players to express their opinions. The suggestion is to limit yourself to four sentences, have more verbal and facial expressions, carry on a mug with a humorous motto on it. Relaxing and smiling are also means of effective communication as they can have a great physiological impact.
Openness: Accepting the fact that as a Leader I won’t know everything and being open to suggestions and feedback will help them make the right business decisions. Set up task forces that can give you an opportunity to see the big picture and advice you.
Agreeableness: Some leaders want “Yes man” around them to keep their ego high and some leaders are too humble and fail to make strong difficult business decisions so that they can be likable. Leaders can be diplomatic, and let their team know that the critique is related to the idea and not individual. Using words like “Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment”, “If I put on my critic’s hat” is one way to accomplish this.
Conscientiousness: Drive, reliability, and persistence are important qualities for leaders, but they can prove dysfunctional if they are not properly channeled. Leaders can lose sight of the big picture in order to be perfectionists. Instead of micro-managing your staff, try putting on a coaching hat and switch to questioning mode. Have a work-life balance, and master some skills in data analytics to check if there is a huge disconnect between your instinct and data.
To be a good leader, executives must gain insight into their personalities, receive feedback from multiple sources, accept and overcome his or her blind spots. We are prisoners of our personalities, so to be a good leader one needs to put in the required hard work and introspection. If you can’t fix all of your personality traits, get a supporting partner who can well balance you out to run a team/company successfully as Steve Jobs did by getting Tim Cook on board. Passion, hard work, and intensity are vital traits for leaders, but those same traits can also be overwhelming so a good leader must be adaptive and be self-aware.
