What Makes Great Leaders: Best Leadership Traits and How to Give Feedback

What makes great leaders?

The 4 best leadership traits and how to get feedback to be a better leader.

Leaders are the most influential people in the wellbeing of an organisation.

According to leadership training expert Suzi McAlpine, leaders that themselves showcase the best approach to their own wellbeing have a better chance of instilling a healthy culture across their organisations.

She says most company leaders today are on board with prioritising wellbeing. Leaders are seeing it’s the right thing to do, and it also makes good business sense.

But there’s a difference between that and having an effective approach to wellbeing. Many miss the mark, and don’t get it right.

Organisations that can implement effective wellbeing measures have been shown to reap considerable rewards in engagement, productivity, retention and profitability.

The 4 best leadership traits to enable workplace wellbeing

The following four traits allow managers and leaders to proactively promote good workplace wellbeing that’s appropriate and effective in any environment.

1. Self awareness

Self awareness is not a fixed point. Perceptions and people change, so leaders need to be on a continual journey to build their own self awareness.

There are two aspects of self awareness, and both are as important as the other.

Internal self awareness. Knowing what your values are, your strengths and weaknesses, knowing what the things are that really light you up.
How the world sees you. The best leaders seek feedback from their people on how their decisions and behaviour impact their wellness. These conversations can be hard, but the more honest they are, the more your leadership style can enable your people to do their best work.

2. Genuine care

The best way for leaders to show wellbeing is a priority is to make a genuine effort to improve it, instead of just paying lip service.

“The best organisations who are doing really well when it comes to wellbeing are not dancing around the edges of wellbeing - ‘Here’s a yoga class, here’s a resilience class.’ Burnout’s not going to be solved by a fruit bowl in a lunchroom,” says Suzi McAlpine.

Deloitte research found that only 56% of employees believe their company’s executives genuinely care about their wellbeing. 91% of C-suite respondents said their employees believe they care.

This concerning lack of insight allows wellbeing issues such as burnout, stress and anxiety to manifest while leaders mistakenly tell themselves they’re doing the right things to combat them. It allows these issues to pop up time and time again, while the root causes go unaddressed.

The disconnect also shows the importance of demonstrating the care you feel you have for your staff. It’s not enough just to feel like you care, you have to show your people that you do.

Caring is about showing empathy and compassion. You can’t fake this step if you don’t have it, and it’s a fundamental, innate requirement of being a good leader.

“Employees who feel personally and consistently cared for are more likely to pay individual attention to not only their customers and colleagues but also the work these people do. The key word here is “consistently”: Great leaders make employee engagement a regular, year-round priority, never limiting their show of appreciation to a single day or season.”

Bruce Jones, Harvard Business Review

3. Lead by your values

As well as knowing what your values are, good leaders have the integrity to live by them. This not only creates the effect of leading by good values, but it sets the example that allows team members to do it too.

Suzi McAlpine gives the example of an exciting work opportunity that would require her to spend more time away from home, and her children.

“For me, it’s family first…to say yes to that opportunity would mean I wasn’t living by my values, so I turned it down.”

Leading by your values means identifying them and being committed to them. Hold yourself accountable to those values and make them pillars of your approach to work.

4. Courage

Courage in leadership takes a few different forms. It’s the courage to take risks and be vulnerable.

Living by your values, as mentioned above, can take courage, particularly if it impacts a work priority.

In this sense, courage is also about integrity. Having the integrity to admit when you’ve made a mistake, to try something new, or to have a difficult conversation that you know is the right thing to do.

The more integrity you bring to courageous decisions, the more you empower your people to do the same. Take holidays, don’t send emails late at night - have the courage to model the behaviour you want to see in your team members.

Getting leadership feedback

It’s hard to get honest feedback as a leader. Employees aren’t exactly excited to tell their manager the things they don’t like about them.

Even if you think you’re empathetic, caring and approachable, your people may not see you that way. It’s critical there are avenues and systems that allow for feedback on your management style to reach you, and that you act on it.

A Gallup study identified a range of advantages that managers who can get good feedback can unlock, compared to those who get no feedback.

8.9% improved profitability
14.9% lower staff turnover
12.5% greater productivity

The trick is to make it safe for people to give you feedback. This involves creating a range of options for feedback, so individuals can do so in a way that gives them the freedom to be completely honest.

To do this, you can:

Talk to people individually, and come up with an agreed process for giving each other feedback
Create indirect pathways for feedback, through other staff members
Enlist an EAP service such as Clearhead to capture staff sentiment anonymously
Think about other systems that don’t require employees to approach you directly with feedback

When you get feedback, it’s also important to act on it. People will be reluctant to risk being honest if they don’t truly believe it will lead to positive change.

But by demonstrating a willingness to listen to feedback, and implement changes as a result, you create an environment where people trust they can provide feedback safely.

Clearhead helps leaders to transform company culture

Clearhead is an EAP scheme that enables leaders to get better transparency and feedback on the wellbeing culture within their organisations.

As well as providing digital wellbeing tools and free counselling for employees to learn how to self-manage their mental health, Clearhead provides comprehensive quarterly employee wellbeing reports.

Clearhead’s data insights allow employees to safely, anonymously provide feedback on managers, and all other aspects of workplace culture. Data is aggregated, and the report is compiled by a clinical psychologist with a background in organisational psychology.

It allows company leaders to understand how their management is impacting their people, and provides feedback on initiatives to improve wellbeing within the workplace.

To find out more about Clearhead’s industry-leading approach to organisational wellbeing, book a free, no obligation demo today.