My Brain Trust Weekly: Effective Leadership

How important is the person leading your company? Just ask the employees and shareholders of Enron, Helmsley Hotel Chain and Sunbeam. Jeffrey Skilling, President & CEO of Enron, Leona Helmsley of the Helmsley Hotel Chain, and Al Dunlap, CEO of Sunbeam, all played a pivotal role in either the complete failures (read: bankruptcy) or near-so of their respective companies.

So what makes a good leader, and what does one do if they believe they’re working for an organization with a leader who is not ready – or worse – is not ethical? The far-reaching impacts on the company, its employees, and shareholders, cannot be understated as the above examples illustrate. Here are some great articles that examine the traits that make the best leaders.

What Makes a Good Leader Today – and Tomorrow? (Huffington Post)
What makes a good leader? Things like integrity, honesty and personal responsibility immediately come to mind. While those are all vital traits, they’re not the leadership traits I’m addressing right now. There’s a new leadership principle leaders must embrace if they want to be relevant and effective in today’s world of technology-driven transformation and move forward into the future.

12 Habits of Exceptional Leaders (Forbes)
Great leadership is indeed a difficult thing to pin down and understand. You know a great leader when you’re working for one, but even they can have a hard time explaining the specifics of what they do that makes their leadership so effective. Great leadership is dynamic; it melds a variety of unique skills into an integrated whole.

30 Ways to Define Leadership (Business News Daily)
Business News Daily asked 30 business owners and experts to define what leadership means to them. Their ideas may just lead you to create your own definition of leadership. Here’s what they had to say.

Can You Learn to Lead? (New York Times)
Is leadership an emergent quality, both situational and context-specific? Or is it something you can actually teach? That is, can you be a leader without ever leading something? Business schools insist you can.

The Trait That Makes Women Great Leaders (Fortune)
What’s most striking about the 15 women in our new ranking of the World’s Greatest Leaders is how strongly they exemplify a new model of leadership. It’s a model in which leaders must influence a wide range of groups over which they have no direct authority, while those groups typically command much power of their own through their access to information and their ability to communicate with practically anyone.

Best Leadership Books of All Time (Inc.)
A list of the most read and highest ranked books on leadership.