Learn five traits of effective leadership
1. Communication
As a leader, you need to be a good communicator. You sit in between your team and the stakeholders, and a lot of information traverses through you. So you need to make sure that as an information conduit, you are open and transparent. You should be able to gather, understand, and process information from one group of people in one format, and be able to pass it to a completely different group in their suited format. For example, you should be able to understand the business requirement and be able to convert them into technical/team level requirements. Conversely, you should be able to transform the team technical jargon into an easy-to-understand language for the stakeholders. Leaders set SMART(Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) objectives, and communication is the tool to avoid confusion in doing so. Communication is one single tool that can be utilized to deal with multiple challenges. All five forms of communication are important: Verbal, Non-verbal, visual, written, and listening. Regarding listening, always remember that God gave you two ears and one mouth, so please use them in the right proportions. If you can’t communicate effectively, then you will struggle to be a good leader.
