Excellent leaders:

• Maintain balance between closeness and distance with their colleagues.
• Develop sensitivities to the collective perspectives, attitudes, and moods of the people they lead.
• Use symbolic behaviors to indicate their ability to meet the needs of their people.
• Support their arguments with anecdotes, analogies, and personal experiences.
• Use their knowledge of self to apply the right skills at the right time.
• Not only demonstrate their strengths, but also reveal their weaknesses.
• Seek honest feedback from staff.
• Stay in touch with who they are and where they’ve been.

This article is based on Why Should Anyone be Led by You? (Harvard Business School Press, February 2006), by London Business School Professors Rob Goffe and Gareth Jones.

(Editor’s note: All the above were characteristic of someone we would all consider a great leader, Abraham Lincoln, as narrated in Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin.)

From Partner’s Report—the Monthly Update for CPA Firm Owners, March 2006, p. 7. For subscription information contact Institute of Management & Administration, Inc., 3 Park Avenue, 30th Floor, New York, NY 10016-5902. One-year subscription $349. 212-244-0360, [email protected].