Paying Attention to Leadership Actions and Traits

Recall a time when you were particularly effective as a leader and bring to mind your actions as well as your personal characteristics or dispositions you exhibited at that time.  As you think of your experiences, it becomes clear that leadership actions and personal traits work hand in hand to support quality leadership.  From such an exercise, people report taking actions such as:

• developing and communication a clear purpose
• holding high expectations for everyone
• anticipating and addressing small problems before they grow into bigger ones
• demonstrating a deep understanding of the work
• developing others
• facilitating change

As they take these actions, leaders are also using personal characteristics that contribute to their success, such as being action oriented, enthusiastic, realistic, risk taking, caring, and committed.  They underscore the importance of having integrity and being a listener and a learner and willing to change minds.  What emerges from this exercise is a composite of actions and traits of effective leadership.  High performance leadership comes from balancing key leadership actions with personal dispositions that strengthen and support leadership results.

Michael Fullan (2001) writes that all of us can become better leaders by focusing on just a few key leadership capacities.  He developed a framework for leadership depicting five capacities for leaders to lead complex change. 

• being guided by a moral purpose
• understanding change processes
• building relationships
• promoting knowledge creation and sharing
• coherence making

Fullan wraps these leadership capacities in three personal characteristics - energy, enthusiasm, and hope - that both build and reinforce the five capacities.  For leaders to achieve high performance they need their actions and dispositions to work in harmony. 


From:  Leading Every Day by Joyce Kaser, Susan Mundry, Katherine E. Stiles, & Susan Loucks-Horsley
Published by: Corwin Press