The 25 most important leadership behaviors

Steve Arneson

Recently, I reviewed a number of leadership competency lists in order to make a recommendation for a company that was interested in updating their competency mandate for leaders. There are a number of good lists out there, including one that I wrote about last fall - Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger’s list of 67 competencies (The Leadership Machine, 2001). As I said then, leadership may be a complex animal, but it certainly has been well examined and classified.
Anyway, all of these competencies lists got me to thinking about what a list of “leadership behaviors” might look like. You see, most competency lists include a collection of traits like courage, compassion, technical skills, intelligence, etc. Critical terms, to be sure – but they read as a list of characteristics leaders need as opposed to a list of what leaders actually do. If you take all of the traits and characteristics and bundle them together, you could potentially generate a list of what leaders do on the job, not just what it takes to be a leader. So naturally, I had to take a stab at it…here’s what I came up with:

The 25 Most Important Leadership Behaviors clicking here