4 Vital Leadership Habits (and 1 Great Result)

Rob Saxon is a Project Management Professional, Certified Information Systems Auditor and a trained Six Sigma Specialist. Rob is currently developing methods to integrate project management into previously unexplored areas of business.

  Leadership   Talent Management  

Understanding the concept of leadership--and how to be a successful leader--is critical to our roles as project managers and program managers. It is important to understand that we must be leaders first, then managers. Indeed, understanding healthy leadership habits can help us to set and maintain a frame of reference for how we want to treat our teams. Having that healthy frame of reference can also inform us of how we need to be treated.

The concept of leadership can be very complicated, but for me it can also be boiled down to a few core principles: care, understanding, service and protection. By no means is this list of principles all inclusive. Keeping a close monitor of these leadership behaviors, however, has helped me to become a better leader of projects, programs and teams.

Care

“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” -- Theodore Roosevelt

We need to care about the people we lead. We need to genuinely want each of our team members to succeed, and we need to invest ourselves in their success. Selfishly, this attitude of caring leads to our ability to be more successful ourselves. Altruistically, in caring deeply about the wellbeing of each of our team members, we cultivate positivity.

Think about the last time a leader came to you and asked how things were going. Think about the last time a leader came to …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.