Leadership is inherently viewed as positive and good. The reality, of course, is something quite different. There are good leaders and there are bad leaders, male and female. There are those who believe that any action by leaders is better than no action at all. This is wishful thinking and absolute nonsense.

If leaders make bad decisions, those actions paralyze the organization, its members, and damage the public and society in many cases. If bad leaders are not told by their followers that they are bad, they will continue to be bad leaders. In the absence of genuine visionary leadership, people are willing to listen to anyone who is willing to step up to the microphone. It’s time we pulled the plug on bad leaders.

Bad leadership will not, cannot, be stopped or slowed unless followers take responsibility for rewarding the good leaders and penalizing the bad ones.

So, what are the personal characteristics of future leaders? Here are thirty personality traits that have been identified as being effective for good leadership:

1. Are enthusiastic, positive, and passionate: good cheerleaders. They are positive about followers power to “envision and create their future” – which is not defined by the past and present of the leader.
2. Are highly competent, seek continuous improvement, and embrace opportunities that no-one else wants to latch on to.
3. They want to be in the hot seat! People in positions of leadership who don’t want to be there and embrace the opportunities and challenges will lead the organization to that infamous place known as mediocrity.
4. Are visible examples and role models to everyone around them… willing to do anything that they ask others to do. They understand “you never have a second chance to make a first impression.”
5. Leaders have and demonstrate integrity… personal and professional.
6. Leaders recognize astutely that their power is only strengthened by reciprocal empowerment of those they lead and influence.
7. Are willing to be seen as colleagues in meetings, letting go of some of the “trappings of power.”
8. Make a habit of reflection and systematically review personal and unit performance; they develop reflection as a personal habit.
9. Pay attention to their organization and watch for changes and retrenchments.
10. Establish social functions and traditions, such as, retreats, informal gatherings, lunches, banquets, and other social symbols that provide social cohesion and common unit experiences – and even a sense of fun.
11. Appreciate, value, and have faith in the collaborative process – trusting that the group will find a solution that works for everyone.
12. Scan the environment (internal, external, and macro) looking for patterns that may impact the organization and distribute those ideas to others; keep reconstituting relevant ideas and concepts, looking for common threads; create and recreate visions and scenarios in her or his mind, and shares ideas with others.
13. Have a tolerance for ambiguity and are prepared to leap the gap rather than tiptoe from stone to stone.
14. Focus organizational attention on areas where collective agreement exists.
15. Are persistent: Don’t give up.
16. Demonstrate patience – wait for group process to coalesce knowing that group processes take time and often come together and get things done at the last minute.
17. Do not take themselves too seriously.
18. Know their personal strengths, weaknesses, tendencies, and perspectives.
19. Value service.
20. Are receptive to views that counter their own. Aggressively seek out individuals with perspectives and strengths that counter their worldview. 
21. Tomorrow’s leaders will need to be able to see the world from multiple perspectives  – and respect differences
22. Leaders must have an international/global view of society.
23. Leaders will need skills in problem-solving, power-sharing and creativity. An ability to achieve results, communication and interpersonal skills, resilience, and ethics and values.
24. Education is essential to remain competitive and on the “cutting-edge.”
25. Future leaders need to learn to listen respectfully, consult with others, work as part of a team, and take responsibility for their actions.
26. Leaders will need to be able to optimize today’s only constant: change. They will need to thrive on chaos.
27. Leaders MUST have mentors and role models who can teach them how to manage the political nature of an organization.
28. In the agricultural and industrial revolutions, units of power used to be land, labor, and capital. Today, in the technological revolution, units of power are information and knowledge.
29. Leaders will need to be politically savvy and willing to make hard decisions.
30. Being in the right place at the right time will still be critical for leaders. Leaders must create time to make themselves available for opportunities.

The original story first appeared in “Leadership Choices for the Future” by Don Olcott Jr., Darcy Hardy, and Theresa Madden of The Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany.

Stop building urgency around the nature of a proposed change. Instead, create the right amount of urgency around how that change can occur. By doing this, you will quickly become familiar with how change is initiated, communicated, and executed within your organization.

If we wind back the clock a few decades, significant change within a business most often came in the shape of disparate one-off events. They followed a process of unfreezing whatever was the status quo — carrying out the change event (for example, a merger) — and then refreezing the organization in its new shape or form. It would then remain like this until the next event came along. 

The disruptive nature of digitalization has brought an entirely new paradigm around change that many in the business world simply weren’t — and still aren’t — fully prepared for. Existing markets and incumbent organizations are being forced to continually adapt and evolve to survive. Digital transformation journeys are now continuous, fast, and constant. Companies can no longer be neatly thawed, reshaped, and then put back on ice for another decade. 

With the dynamics of business transformation vastly different than they once were, the leadership skills needed to navigate change must evolve to meet the moment. 

As a leader that has had significant exposure to change characteristics of the last two decades — and as a former head of business development at Google, a company that manages to combine size with extreme rates of change — I believe that there are some keys to navigating continuous change that I hope will help others. 

In the last 30 years, if you’ve taken a change management course, pursued an MBA, or just tried to educate yourself in this area, you are likely to have come across one of the most famous and widely used change management assets: Kotter’s eight steps from 1995. 

The model presents eight reasons why change efforts most commonly fail. It offers eight steps that organizations should follow if they’re to succeed with large-scale transformation. This framework, together with the majority of the others out there, risk triggering change fatigue in organizations, as many of the modern models still assume change comes from a series of singular, unlinked events rather than one continuous, everlasting process. 

Making Change Matter

For any leader relying on these frameworks, a first crucial step preceding any change event is their ability to create enough urgency in the organization for it to act. This is mainly built on the assumption that if employees don’t understand or grasp the urgency of a change, they will be unlikely to go along with it and even actively resist it. 

Some leaders successfully fabricate urgency and make a situation look worse than it is. The primary purpose has been to whip the organization into enough panic to ensure that no one is left uncertain in understanding what needs to be done. 

This way of managing urgency assumes at least two things. First, that management has a level of certainty that the change being proposed will have a positive outcome, and is indeed the right one. Second, there will be an opportunity for the organization to recover from this induced state of panic once the change is complete. In a world where the outcome of any large-scale change effort is so highly unpredictable, it is improbable that both of those assumptions will turn out to be true. 

On several occasions, I have seen leaders’ credibility undermined by overselling the potential impacts of individual change events. Often, the positioning of a ‘Silver Bullet’ project ends up doing more harm than good as it becomes evident to employees that management could not predict the future with any real accuracy and that the change that was supposed to set them on a robust new footing had become obsolete before it was fully implemented. 

As a result, when the project comes to an end — and the organization finds its new normal and people snap out of their panic state — new change is already needed as the environment has evolved beyond the original expectation.

The result of this cycle? Burnt out staff that are even less likely to positively engage in the next round of change and a senior leadership team that has lost credibility and might have to push the panic button harder for the next round
of changes. 

Choosing an Alternate Method

To rethink how change is managed, it’s best to start by rethinking these fundamental assumptions. While leaders might have a good idea of what needs to be done to evolve their organization, they can’t predict the future. Based on that understanding, the idea of the singular silver-bullet solution providing a competitive advantage for any amount of time becomes far more unrealistic and untenable. 

Creating transparent communication within an organization is critical. Leaders can acknowledge that the future is unknown but that the organization is rebuilding itself to handle whatever might be thrown at it. The urgency created around that effort rather than promoting an individual change event invariably leads to broader acceptance of change and is a stronger position from which to take action. Creating urgency around rebuilding processes for continuous learning and constant adaptation will ensure that a leader’s credibility is not bound to one transformational event’s success. Leaders can then create a sense of continuity, regardless of how many changes there might have to be in the decades to come.

It’s in Bertrand Piccard’s DNA to go beyond the obvious and achieve the impossible. From a legendary lineage of explorers who conquered the stratosphere and the deepest troughs of our oceans, he made history by accomplishing two aeronautical firsts: around the world non-stop in a balloon, and then again in a solar plane without fuel.

He’s a pioneer who challenges us to consider ecology through the lens of profitability, ever since he began working in the early 2000s to promote renewable energies and clean technologies. His dual identity as a psychiatrist and explorer makes him an influential voice heard by the largest institutions, which today consider him a forward-thinking leader in innovation and sustainability. The founder and chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation, Piccard is also a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment and Special Advisor to the European Commission.

1. Develop a 360-Degree Awareness

When Bertrand was floating around the world in a hot air balloon, he realized the opportunities (the wind) lay above and below him. Staying the prisoner of a single altitude will result in lost opportunities and risk of failure.

Action: Keep aware of broader business conditions and trends beyond your own sector, and learn to seek out the hidden “currents” above and below you to keep moving forward. To be a real leader in life, you need to shed the dogmas and rigid ways of thought. Instead, try and explore all the different ways of thinking around a problem.

2. Find the Benefits Among Hard Choices

Look at the climate crisis in context over the past 50 years. There have been massive increases in production, waste, and inefficiency, leading to the ecological disaster we see today. Environmental activists became stuck at the wrong “altitude,” telling us that it would be costly to fix things and that we needed to reduce consumption, growth, and comfort, and create subsidies. The result? Nobody wanted to follow this unattractive path.

Action: Change your mindset and adopt the opposite approach: Solving the climate crisis can be profitable and create jobs. Explore what the technologies of today can allow you to do today. Bertrand discovered that while flying 27,000 miles around the world without a single drop of fuel. The four electric motors of his solar-powered plane had a record-beating efficiency of 97%, far ahead of the miserable 27% of standard thermal engines. This means that they only lost 3% of the energy they used versus 73% for combustion propulsion.

It’s evident that opportunity and profit are to be found in the former. Search for efficiencies in your business that can generate more profit. Even waste can be a resource.

3. Highlight the Profit in Your Social Cause

Bertrand set himself a goal of finding 1,000 profitable solutions to fight climate change. He was told it was impossible but proved his detractors wrong. He was also told he wouldn’t need to go past 300, as that’s supposedly how many problems there are in the world. 

Action: There is no miracle solution to climate change —  rather, there are hundreds, found in sectors such as water, energy, agriculture, construction, mobility, and in startups and established companies alike. Talking only about protecting the environment will fall on deaf ears. To move your next idea forward, talk about solutions that will increase profit instead. Seek out success stories to make your point and convince customers, shareholders,
and partners. 

4. Seek Solutions Everywhere

Disruption in your business is very important. Remember that it wasn’t the people making candles that invented the lightbulb. The first successful electric car did not come from the car industry. Elon Musk was not a car manufacturer. He looked at a computer screen and asked, “How can I build a car around this?” It’s dangerous for your success to do more of the same; the straight line in life is very unproductive.

Action: Don’t wait for your current business model to crash from inaction. Instead, ask yourself: “Why am I not ready for a new life?” Learn to think the exact opposite of what you have heard and learned. This does not mean you should do the opposite, but rather, break from the straight-line thinking that we have been taught. See the future in 3D — seek opportunities above, below, and alongside. When you are focused on what you know, you miss everything else. 

Don’t become a stranded asset by holding on to outdated services, systems, and products. It’s bad leadership to continue with unsustainable business practices as it will hurt your bottom line as well as you, your shareholders, and employees. For example, imagine oil companies using their drilling expertise to drill for geothermal energy in cities instead of oil. How can you repurpose something you already do into a critical (more profitable) need for
the future?

5. Are You at Risk of Becoming Redundant?

Ask yourself if your product or service is at risk of becoming redundant.

Action: Open yourself to new ways of thinking and doing. Collaborate with other companies that may not seem like a logical fit but can open your mind to new possibilities and how to repurpose your product or service.

6. Stay Curious

A leader should develop a particular mindset around innovation.

Action: A real leader has curiosity and looks for things they don’t know. Don’t be happy with what you already know. Always try to find out for yourself if something is possible. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations, travel to the source of your curiosity, and see something different with your own eyes. Develop a sense of adventure around reinventing yourself and your business. Good leaders should be explorers, seeing beyond the obvious. 

The possible is not found in reality but in the mindset of seeing things differently. A real leader never believes they are more clever than another. A leader should doubt – not hesitate — by asking questions of those around them. Be open to all possible directions.

It’s in Bertrand Piccard’s DNA to go beyond the obvious and achieve the impossible. From a legendary lineage of explorers who conquered the stratosphere and the deepest troughs of our oceans, he made history by accomplishing two aeronautical firsts: around the world non-stop in a balloon, and then again in a solar plane without fuel.

He’s a pioneer who challenges us to consider ecology through the lens of profitability, ever since he began working in the early 2000s to promote renewable energies and clean technologies. His dual identity as a psychiatrist and explorer makes him an influential voice heard by the largest institutions, which today consider him a forward-thinking leader in innovation and sustainability. The founder and chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation, Piccard is also a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment and Special Advisor to the European Commission.

1. Develop a 360-Degree Awareness

When Bertrand was floating around the world in a hot air balloon, he realized the opportunities (the wind) lay above and below him. Staying the prisoner of a single altitude will result in lost opportunities and risk of failure.

Action: Keep aware of broader business conditions and trends beyond your own sector, and learn to seek out the hidden “currents” above and below you to keep moving forward. To be a real leader in life, you need to shed the dogmas and rigid ways of thought. Instead, try and explore all the different ways of thinking around a problem.

2. Find the Benefits Among Hard Choices

Look at the climate crisis in context over the past 50 years. There have been massive increases in production, waste, and inefficiency, leading to the ecological disaster we see today. Environmental activists became stuck at the wrong “altitude,” telling us that it would be costly to fix things and that we needed to reduce consumption, growth, and comfort, and create subsidies. The result? Nobody wanted to follow this unattractive path.

Action: Change your mindset and adopt the opposite approach: Solving the climate crisis can be profitable and create jobs. Explore what the technologies of today can allow you to do today. Bertrand discovered that while flying 27,000 miles around the world without a single drop of fuel. The four electric motors of his solar-powered plane had a record-beating efficiency of 97%, far ahead of the miserable 27% of standard thermal engines. This means that they only lost 3% of the energy they used versus 73% for combustion propulsion.

It’s evident that opportunity and profit are to be found in the former. Search for efficiencies in your business that can generate more profit. Even waste can be a resource.

3. Highlight the Profit in Your Social Cause

Bertrand set himself a goal of finding 1,000 profitable solutions to fight climate change. He was told it was impossible but proved his detractors wrong. He was also told he wouldn’t need to go past 300, as that’s supposedly how many problems there are in the world. 

Action: There is no miracle solution to climate change —  rather, there are hundreds, found in sectors such as water, energy, agriculture, construction, mobility, and in startups and established companies alike. Talking only about protecting the environment will fall on deaf ears. To move your next idea forward, talk about solutions that will increase profit instead. Seek out success stories to make your point and convince customers, shareholders,
and partners. 

4. Seek Solutions Everywhere

Disruption in your business is very important. Remember that it wasn’t the people making candles that invented the lightbulb. The first successful electric car did not come from the car industry. Elon Musk was not a car manufacturer. He looked at a computer screen and asked, “How can I build a car around this?” It’s dangerous for your success to do more of the same; the straight line in life is very unproductive.

Action: Don’t wait for your current business model to crash from inaction. Instead, ask yourself: “Why am I not ready for a new life?” Learn to think the exact opposite of what you have heard and learned. This does not mean you should do the opposite, but rather, break from the straight-line thinking that we have been taught. See the future in 3D — seek opportunities above, below, and alongside. When you are focused on what you know, you miss everything else. 

Don’t become a stranded asset by holding on to outdated services, systems, and products. It’s bad leadership to continue with unsustainable business practices as it will hurt your bottom line as well as you, your shareholders, and employees. For example, imagine oil companies using their drilling expertise to drill for geothermal energy in cities instead of oil. How can you repurpose something you already do into a critical (more profitable) need for
the future?

5. Are You at Risk of Becoming Redundant?

Ask yourself if your product or service is at risk of becoming redundant.

Action: Open yourself to new ways of thinking and doing. Collaborate with other companies that may not seem like a logical fit but can open your mind to new possibilities and how to repurpose your product or service.

6. Stay Curious

A leader should develop a particular mindset around innovation.

Action: A real leader has curiosity and looks for things they don’t know. Don’t be happy with what you already know. Always try to find out for yourself if something is possible. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations, travel to the source of your curiosity, and see something different with your own eyes. Develop a sense of adventure around reinventing yourself and your business. Good leaders should be explorers, seeing beyond the obvious. 

The possible is not found in reality but in the mindset of seeing things differently. A real leader never believes they are more clever than another. A leader should doubt – not hesitate — by asking questions of those around them. Be open to all possible directions.