Six qualities you need to be a great leader in 2023

Discover why businesses need good leaders and the qualities it takes to become one. Our Group Head of People and Culture, Sandra Henke,  provides her 6 top qualities and industry insights.

What makes a good leader: Key insights

Leadership styles in the UK differ from industry to industry, but we’ve seen rising leaders focusing on vulnerability and empathy across the board. 

• 90% of CEOs planned to boost their spending on leadership development in the coming years
• Good leaders focus on helping others complete their work, not their own achievements.
• “Servant leadership” is on the rise; an empathy-based leadership that contrasts historical approaches to leadership.
• Many historic skills still apply to all leaders, such as critical thinking, but today employees value trust and relationship building.
• Even with countless studies, there are many great ways to be a leader. Instead, individuals should focus on continuous development and the needs of those they lead.

Keep reading for the 6 qualities you need to become an inspirational leader and how to achieve them.

If you’d like to speak to a consultant about skills and management training, please contact your local office.

Why do businesses need good leaders?

Modern business challenges require modern solutions. Successful leaders must evolve their skills to keep up with new challenges. But what does a modern leader look like, and how can organisations develop them?

Some studies we’ve reviewed at hays draw parallels between strong leadership and solid organisational performance. But the skills leaders need in today’s world are changing whether you’re a junior manager or a senior executive. 

You must couple traditional coveted leadership skills with new abilities in today’s rapidly evolving and unpredictable world. A global study by McKinsey & Company found that more than 90% of CEOs planned to boost their spending on leadership development. Those CEOs rated leadership as the most crucial human-capital issue their organisation faced. 

The McKinsey & Company report also found that leadership strength explains about 80% of the variance in organisations’ ability to sustain long-term performance. Yet McKinsey also found that more than half of companies are not confident their leadership development will yield positive results.

So, how can you support yourself and your peers to become better leaders? Here are 6 essential skills for any modern leader:

6 characteristics of a great leader in 2023

1. Remember a leader is there to help others do their job better

Before looking at what new skills leaders need, it's worth reflecting on what a leader is. Being in charge of colleagues does not necessarily make you a 'leader'.

In a speech at Harvard University, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said, "Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence."

Meanwhile, retired astronaut Chris Hadfield believes leadership is "not about glorious crowning acts". 

In his book 'An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth' he said: "It's about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it. Especially when the stakes are high, and the consequences really matter," 

While there are many other opinions out there, most agree a leader helps other people to do their job better. But what traits are needed to achieve this in the modern workplace?

2. Use blended leadership styles for a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) world

VUCA = volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

Stacey Philpot, Human Capital Principal at Deloitte Consulting in the US looked at psychological assessments of 23,000 senior leaders over the past 25 years. He found the core skills that were historically most needed have not changed.

The core leadership skills include pattern recognition, motivation, agility and emotional intelligence, or the ability to understand, control and express emotions.

However, leadership must move with changing cultures, says John Rocco, Vice President of Marketing, Canadian Banking at Scotiabank in Toronto. He said: “Being comfortable with not having the answer, owning failure and drawing lessons from it, can create an environment of trust and openness that creates innovation”.

Collectively, these behaviours form “servant leadership”. Leaders create the conditions for teams to excel by displaying empathy and vulnerability. This is a marked shift from the authoritative, ‘command-and-control’ leadership style that once prevailed.

How can organisations implement servant leadership?

But given the stigma around servant leadership, how can it be encouraged in organisations? Alsu Polyakova, HR Leader for RCIS, GE Healthcare, says the key is frequent performance appraisals for leaders, where behaviours are decoded and encouraged. “We give leaders lots of opportunities for self-reflection, so they understand how they behave,” she says.

GE Healthcare’s most successful leaders help to encourage behavioural change, Polyakova says. Success is measured by how well employees rate leaders on achieving GE Healthcare’s “cultural pillars”.

Organisations can scale their leadership once they have a clear set of values everyone understands. Rocco says: “The most senior leaders must demonstrate leadership behaviours that are aligned to those values. If leaders walk the talk and create the conditions for those leadership values to flourish, the propensity for others to model that behaviour increases dramatically.”

He adds that behaviours contrary to those leadership values become more visible and, ideally, are not tolerated. “This effectively snuffs out the oxygen that breeds bad leadership,” he says.

3. Build a culture of trust

Gaining workers’ trust is more important than ever, says Nadezhda Kokoliya, Bayer’s Head of Talent Acquisition for Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). 71% of employees believe it’s critically important for their CEOs to invest in climate change, according to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer. Using active listening and responding to these concerns can help leaders build trust.

Building trust can yield rich rewards. The Edelman poll shows that workers who trust their employers are more engaged and loyal than their more sceptical peers. 

“If employees don’t trust you, they won’t follow you,” agrees Kokoliya, who measures trust through regional workforce surveys. “But employees are questioning management decisions more so than in the past because they are more informed by the proliferation of information online.”

While leadership styles are changing, the most influential leaders tailor their styles to suit different scenarios. This comes from Professor Sattar Bawany, CEO of the Centre for Executive Education in Singapore. 

“Leaders need a broad repertoire of management styles and the wisdom to know when each style should be used,” he says. “In crisis scenarios like cybersecurity breaches, for example, leadership should be authoritarian because the scenario is unstructured.”

4. Adapt your leadership style for different generations

Managers must also balance leadership styles to suit different generations. Modern workplaces will soon house five generations under one roof: Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z and Gen I. 

According to Lindsey Pollak, author of The Remix: How to lead and succeed in the multigenerational workplace, each generation has its own leadership preferences.

Lindsey believes modern leaders must mix old and new leadership styles that better suit younger generations. That’s because millennials are forecast to account for three-quarters of all workers in the US by 2030.

“Twenty years ago, everything in organisations was on a ‘need-to-know’ basis,” she says. “With millennials, you need to be more explicit in giving instruction and explaining why to keep them engaged.”

5. Commit to lifelong learning

With the workplace evolving so rapidly, leaders cannot rely on experience alone to get by. 

Norm Smallwood, who co-founded The RBL Group, a leadership consultancy shared the following. “Being exposed to many situations means you may be able to deal with future uncertainty because you have developed resilience,” he acknowledges. “But many leaders are siloed, running one function.”

Ben Farmer, Head of HR, UK Corporate at Amazon UK, concurs: “Experience is not always synonymous with wisdom and judgement. And naivety doesn’t always engender novel thinking and openness to change.”

Therefore, organisations should look for leaders who understand the future better and those with a wealth of experience. 

“Success comes from combining an understanding of exciting, new trends with the experience required to put that knowledge into action,” says Farmer.

For example, experience is less important in rapidly evolving industries such as manufacturing (because of robotics), as prior knowledge may quickly become stale, says Bawany.

6. Be aware of cultural differences around risk and instinct

Risk-averse firms may prefer experience over novel thinking. To mitigate this risk, companies should look for leaders who make decisions based on scientific evidence. That’s according to Omid Shiraji, a Consultant Chief Information Officer for a London council.

“Leaders need to use increasingly available data to inform their decisions, but they should always use intuition to augment the data,” he says.

Ultimately, there’s no blueprint for an effective modern leader, says Anuj Kumar, UK Financial Services Lead on Banking Industry Strategy at SAP. He says each leader must take a tailored approach to their organisational culture, industry nuances, and employee mix.

But above all, says Kumar, leaders should recognise that today’s reality may be old news tomorrow. “The winners will be leaders who are proactively shaping things while also quickly adapting to doing things differently,” he concludes.

Becoming a modern leader: Next steps

Continue learning about essential skills by downloading the 2022 What Workers Want report, where we surveyed 5,100 people on continuous learning.

Ready to take action? We’ve helped individuals create tailored action plans to upskill their management leaders. Contact your local office to speak to a leadership consultant from Hays.