Leadership Qualities & Traits

Many people believe that leaders are born not made and think all leaders share certain leadership qualities.  Thus, they believe, the key to having good leaders is to find people with the right leadership traits… and perhaps give them some training.

The Problem

Now leaving aside the question of whether leaders are born or made, which I’ve addressed in this blog article – “Are Leaders Born or Made?” – there’s a problem with this line of thinking on leadership traits: research shows there is no universal, common set of leadership qualities.

Ralph Stogdill’s Work

The idea of researching leadership traits has been around for at least 150 years.  However it was after Ralph Stogdill wrote his 1948 paper, “Personal Factors Associated with Leadership: a Survey of the Literature”, that people began to doubt the leadership traits theory.

He looked at the data from more than 100 studies and analysed their conclusions across 27 groups of factors.  They included leadership qualities like: dominance, responsibility, integrity, self-confidence, intelligence, adaptability, social mobility, popularity and many more.

What did he find?  That there wasn’t much agreement on the key qualities of a leader.

Indeed, it’s now clear that if you combine everyone’s findings over the decades, the list of leadership qualities has become so long it’s unusable as a guide to selecting future leaders.

Leadership Qualities & The Leader’s Context

Interestingly, Stogdill was one of the first to point out that a person doesn’t become an effective leader just because he or she has certain leadership qualities.

He argued that the qualities of successful leaders must be relevant to the circumstances they are in.  That is, to the specific challenges they face and the abilities, hopes, values and concerns of their followers.

This, of course, paved the way for what became known as situational theories of leadership.

Leadership Qualities & Leadership Presence

Despite the leadership traits-based approach falling out of favour among academics, it’s still around today in popular literature.  Why?  Perhaps because it’s still true to say that the best leaders do have distinct leadership qualities that enable them to lead well.

After all, if you consider the best leaders you’ve worked with, did they not have a certain intangible “something” about them that was crucial to their leadership – what many people call leadership presence (and some call executive presence)?   I’ve found that for most of us the answer is, “Yes.”

So perhaps although distinctive leadership qualities are indeed part of the best leaders’ make up, there’s no one set of winning leadership traits underlying leadership presence.

Thus, every successful leader has his or her own unique combination of leadership qualities.  Which would explain why researchers have found so many leadership traits.

So perhaps we should be focusing on the keys to leadership presence rather than hunting for common traits.