This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:
What makes a good leader?
I pretty-much answered this in an RSS Only post about a year ago, while talking about the things I’m worst at when I’m a leader, and that I therefore admired in others (along with specific examples of real people I’d worked under). The features I picked out that I admired were:
- An ability to keep track of all the moving parts in and around a team,
- The courage to demonstrate and encourage emotional honesty in professional environments, and
- A keenness to proactively support the people you lead.
(Incidentally, did you know that I publish some of my posts “RSS Only”: that is, they don’t show up on my homepage, generally don’t appear in my social feeds, etc. The only way to know when one is published is to subscribe to my blog using RSS, or one of the other mechanisms by which my “RSS Only” content gets shared, e.g. email…)
Anyway: I haven’t changed my mind in the last year – for me personally, the qualities I look for in a leader are those that compensate for the things at which I’m weakest. I want a leader that can pull me, push me ahead, point the way, or just hang back and let me explore, depending on what the situation demands. And I still stick by the list I wrote a year ago.