Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Characteristics of Leadership

I could use your help identifying the characteristics of leadership. I am presenting at the summer conference for ACEC Georgia next month. The title of my presentation is Identifying and Developing Your Future Leaders.

While I could create the presentation on my own, I thought I would ask my friends (that’s you) for your ideas on leadership. What do you consider the key characteristics of leadership to be? How do you identify your leaders? What makes you a leader?

My Oxford Dictionary defines leadership as a quality of a leader, one who leads. Duh. Among the many definitions of lead (v) are: cause to go with one, especially by guiding or showing the way; direct the actions or opinions of; guide by persuasion, example or argument. I’ll buy those as characteristics of leadership.

How do you define leadership?

But how do you define leadership? What qualities, experience, and skills do you look for in the leaders you follow? And in the leaders you develop?

Please help me out. Take a minute right now and send me an email with your thoughts. Email me to let me know what characteristics of leadership you look for. I will share the results with everyone in a week or two.

You’ll also be helping out by giving me ideas about what to include in our Future Leaders online coaching program, coming up soon. If you haven’t signed up to get details on that, send an email to: futurelead@aweber.com That service sends an email to me to let me know that you want info. You won’t end up on some remote site that sends you tons of spam.

www.WeKnowEngineers.com is live!

I almost forgot: The new website is up! Visit www.WeKnowEngineers.com to see what we have for you. Be sure to check out the Free Stuff page for articles on communication and leadership, historical engineering case studies, and—of course—jokes.

2 comments:

Roztafarian Bill said...

Hi Pam,

It will be interesting to note responses to this....

I highly recommend you get a copy of Seth Godin's new book, "Tribes."

Godin says, "A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea." He also says, "A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate."

This is a small book, fast read, and is about leadership, one of the three legs of the tribe. Its subtitle is, "We need you to lead us."

abhinay said...

Article is very interesting !
Thanks for the Information
Regards Education Site