After decades of research and thousands of interviews with great leaders, Gallup research discovered seven factors crucial to leadership success which were identified as follows.

1. Visioning
Successful leaders are able to look out, across, and beyond the organization. They have a talent for seeing and creating the future. They

use highly visual language that paints pictures of the future for those they lead.

2. Maximizing Values
By highlighting what is important about work, great leaders make clear what is important to them in life. They clarify how their own values — particularly a concern for people — relate to their work. They also communicate a sense of personal integrity and a commitment to act based on their values… As a result, employees know where they stand with these leaders.

3. Challenging Experience
Confronting challenges produces beneficial effects for leaders. It accelerates their learning curve, stretches their capacity for high performance, and broadens their horizons about what is possible for an organization to achieve.

4. Mentoring
These mentoring relationships are not the product of formal company-wide mentoring programs — not that these aren’t helpful. Instead, these informal, yet successful, mentoring relationships enable each individual leader’s needs and differences to be taken into account…. Inspired by their positive experiences with mentors, the leaders we studied have become intentional mentors themselves. They selectively pick one, two, or three highly talented individuals and invest greatly in their growth and development over a significant period of time. They see the success of these ‘mentees’ as a reflection of their own success. These leaders practice a form of succession planning that cultivates the next generation of leaders.

5. Building a Constituency
One leader said, ‘My work forces me to have a relationship with certain people. I just think about those I don’t yet work with and figure out who might be useful to know. I nearly always find that relationships built this way bring dividends.’ These leaders understand networks and the importance of networking.

6. Making Sense of Experience
They also learn from their mistakes and their successes, and — as they seek out a range of experts across their wide constituency — they ask questions and listen…. What’s more, these leaders are able to deal with the complexity of business life and help those around them make sense of it. They do this by keeping things simple and making information accessible. This way, these leaders help individuals understand what’s going on so that they are better able to achieve success. As one leader put it, ‘There’s so much happening that affects our work. I make sure, at each meeting, that we understand all the important factors and ensure that the next steps are clearly laid out.

7. Knowing Self
They don’t try to be all things to all people. Their personalities and behaviors are indistinguishable between work and home. They are genuine. It is this absence of pretense that helps them connect to others so well.

The seven demands of leadership
Writer By : George Ambler Source