What Is Leadership?

What Makes a Great Leader?

Even though there are many styles of leadership, you can judge if one certain approach works or not by one simple metric: is that leader getting the outcome he or she wants?
Specifically, it’s about the purpose and the people: is the goal set out by them being achieved, and are the people they’re leading happy as they work towards that goal?
To do these, a great leader has to be someone who can identify and strike the right balance between what are usually two opposing ideas.
Here are what those balances look like:

1. Communicating top-down, but also bottom-up

Leaders have to be great communicators. They have to talk to the people they’re leading regularly and have a consistent message that resonates. This is what creates alignment and trust between people.
Empathy is also important when it comes to leadership. As Kate Pritchard, a consultant specialized in leadership management and employee engagement, told us, “To improve engagement, leaders need to demonstrate that they care about their employees, to listen to them, involve them, and respond to their views”.
Leaders create the space for that kind of contribution and empower the people they lead to accomplish that through upward feedback. They have the ability to make those people around them feel bigger and bolder. It’s about the people they lead, not about themselves.

2. Having strong convictions, but continuing to learn

Balancing communicating well with taking in feedback goes hand in hand with having strong ideals while being willing to put those head-to-head with new data points you’re taking in.
According to Roselinde Torres,
“Great leaders are not head-down. They see around corners, shaping their future, not just reacting to it.”
There’s a great Quartz article that talks about what makes a great leader, and they describe them with a few different terms: intellectually humble, opinionated adaptors, and flexible visionaries.
Here’s an example of how they’ve visualized opinionated adaptors so that it’s easy to see the balance a leader is trying to strike:
As Tomasz Tunguz, a prolific blogger and partner at the venture capital firm Redpoint, writes, “the core of leadership starts with listening and then being able to balance the external points of view with a strong sense of self (values, direction, belief).”