Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Leader? (5 Necessary Leadership Traits)

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Last Updated on October 7, 2024 by Bill Truby

Bill Truby went on a 2-year journey to discover the “lowest common denominator” traits every successful leader possesses. This video reveals what he found. See if you have what it takes to be a leader…or what you need to learn to bolster your skillsets.

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Video Transcript

I was just reflecting on a journey I took in the 70s. Trying to figure out what makes a good leader. I went on a journey to hunt for the information. I read every article I could read, every book I could read, and literally took two years studying this subject, asking the question, what makes a good leader?

Now, I’ve always been able to take the complex and distill it down to its lowest common denominators. It’s basic essence, and I think I did it then, and I did it back that many years ago, and it’s still applicable today. And I found that everything that I read, every attribute, every characteristic, every trait boiled down into five different basic skill sets.

The first skill set in the list of five traits that I found was personal mastery. The ability to not put your neediness onto other people. The ability to not have dysfunction drive you. The ability to be objective, and have a healthy self-esteem, and treat people with humility and others centeredness. Self-esteem was the first.

Second was interpersonal communication skills That’s sort of an obvious one, don’t you think? A leader has to be able to interact with people well. So the ability to read people, the ability to communicate, the ability to listen. The ability to have interpersonal skills, specifically surrounding communication was paramount in the skill sets needed to interact with people.

And the third was the ability to take a group of people and build them into a team. Ideally a high-performing team. If you don’t have the ability to motivate, to gather, to bind people together toward an achievement, then you’re not going to be able to be a good leader.

Leaders lead people toward achievement, and if you can’t do that, you’re not really leading anybody. You know the old saying, if you look behind you, nobody’s following. You’re not a leader. So the third skill set is the ability to pull people together individuals together and make them into a high-performing team.

The fourth one was an interesting one to me. It was systems thinking. Leaders have the ability to think in the context of systems, both in terms of how systems interact, things interact like our ecosystem, and the ability to think about systems in terms of flow. The interaction piece, the interaction aspect of systems, causes a leader to be able to make decisions with the broad picture in mind.

If you decide this about that, what is it due to this which is connected to this and this? So systems thinking is important in the context of interaction. But it’s also important in the context of flow. Five ways to do things right is wrong. A team is aligned around a way, a process, a system that starts with point A and ends at point Z.

So you’re moving along this path of doing something the same way so that we don’t have scattered nets. You know, no quarterback says let’s run these four plays at once. Surely one of them will work. No, instead we align around a way to do something because again, five ways to do something right is wrong.

And the last one of the five was creative flexibility. Leaders are not stuck. Leaders are not rigid. Leaders are constantly looking over the horizon to see what’s coming. Leaders will take what’s there and create what needs to be. They’re creative in their thinking. And they’re flexible in how they approach life.

So when I was asked what are the essential leadership skills? I reflected back to my research and my journey long, long ago and realized that the same five traits are still applicable today.

Personal mastery, interpersonal communication skills, the ability to pull people together into a team, systems thinking, and creative flexibility.

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