Leadership Traits

There is someone in almost every organization who does something nobody asked them to do.

Maybe they arrive a little early or stay a few minutes late. Maybe they are the person who notices the dishwasher is full and empties it every morning, helps the new employee who looks lost, or stays with a problem that technically belongs to somebody else. Nobody assigned these things to them. They are not in the job description, there is no KPI attached to them, and chances are nobody is keeping score. They just do them.

I am not suggesting that emptying the dishwasher makes someone a leader. Leadership is far more complicated than that. But I do believe it can reveal something important: a trait of leadership. It is the willingness to do more than what is required, not because someone expects it, but because that is the standard you have established for yourself.

There is a meaningful difference between performing at a high level because someone expects it from you and performing at a high level because you expect it from yourself.

We tend to recognize leadership after it becomes obvious. Someone gets promoted, manages a team, runs a department, and eventually earns the title. But I wonder how often the important part began much earlier, when that person developed the habit of taking responsibility before responsibility was formally given to them.

They noticed things that needed attention and handled them. They helped other people succeed. They took ownership of problems they could easily have walked past. They did small things well even when there was no advantage in being seen doing them.

Those behaviors don't automatically make someone a leader, but when I see them consistently, I pay attention.

Organizations spend enormous amounts of time establishing standards through policies, procedures, performance measures, goals, and job descriptions. All of those things matter. But there is one standard an organization can never completely establish for another person: the standard they hold for themselves.

You can establish working hours, but you cannot write a policy that makes someone care. You can assign responsibility, but you cannot require ownership. You can measure performance, but it is much harder to measure the instinct to step forward when something needs to be done and nobody is asking. That is one reason People is one of the Four Points.

Leadership isn't always loud, and it doesn't always announce itself with a title. Sometimes its earliest traits appear in the ordinary things people choose to do when there is no recognition attached to doing them.

The interesting question may not be, “Who are the leaders in my organization?”

It may be, “Who is already showing me that they could become one?”

Did You See It?

Look around. What are you doing that you don't have to do? What are the people on your team doing that nobody requires of them? Who consistently steps forward when they could just as easily walk past?

And if you see that person, what are you doing next?