What People Look For and Want from Their Leaders
What People Look For and Want from Their Leaders
To better understand leadership as a relationship, we investigated the expectations that constituents have of leaders. We asked people to tell us the personal traits, characteristics, and attributes they look for and admire in a person whom they would be willing to follow. The responses both affirm and enrich the picture that emerged from studies of personal leadership bests.
We began this research on what constituents expect of leaders more than thirty years ago by surveying thousands of business and government executives. Several hundred different values, traits, and characteristics were identified in response to the open-ended question about what they looked for in a person they would be willing to follow.13 Subsequent content analysis by several independent judges, followed by further empirical analyses, reduced these items to a list of twenty characteristics (each grouped with several synonyms for clarification and completeness).
From this list of twenty characteristics, we developed the Char- acteristics of Admired Leaders checklist. It has been administered to well over one hundred thousand people around the globe, and the results are continuously updated. This one-page survey asks respon- dents to select the seven qualities, out of twenty, that they “most look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction they would willingly follow.” The key word in this statement is willingly. What do they expect from a leader they would follow, not because they have to, but because they want to?
The results have been striking in their regularity. Over the years, wherever this question is asked, it’s clear, as the data in Table 1.2 illustrate, that there are some essential “character tests” an individual must pass before others are willing to grant the designation leader.
