Five leadership habits you can learn to adopt

Can you really lead a team while staying true to yourself? Absolutely, you can and should, suggest Professor Peter Jordan and Associate Professor Luke Houghton, two of Griffith’s leading leadership experts and teachers in the MBA degree. Want to know how? Here are their five top tips.

1. Establish your values

“Values-based leadership is about establishing a strong set of principles that you want to demonstrate,” Dr Houghton says.

It’s also about finding your own leadership style, Dr Jordan adds.

“You can’t really lead an organisation until you understand yourself,” he says. “Many people go their whole careers without thinking about what their values are, but they’re missing a big opportunity.

“You can’t really lead an organisation until you understand yourself

“When you lead from a place that genuinely reflects how you feel and what you hold dear, you will usually become a more effective, more successful and more respected leader.”

2. Live up to your values

It’s not enough just to talk about values though; leaders must create a lived experience.

“Values must be felt and seen,” Dr Houghton explains. “And this is a really challenging idea for a lot of people. Instead of asking ‘is this going to help me to get ahead?’, leaders should ask themselves: ‘how will these values help the people around me?’.

“Your values are about the impact you create – and not only now, but over the long term. Rather than just thinking about one job or one organisation, consider the arc of your entire career and your relationships. What do you want to want to stand for? How do you want to make the world a better place?”

3. Share the 'why'

Alongside values sit your direction and vision. If you’re not leading with purpose, you’re not likely to get the best out of your team, Dr Jordan says.

“The ‘automaton’ leader who issues instructions and expects them to be followed doesn’t reflect the way people want to connect to their leaders and their jobs anymore,” he says.

Dr Houghton agrees and says not sharing your purpose can have wide-ranging impacts.

“I’m increasingly hearing about purpose in connection with retention,” he says. “There is a groundswell of younger professionals, in particular, who are saying ‘I want to work for an organisation – and a person – that I believe in. I want to be inspired and I want my work to reflect my values’. It’s not just a job, anymore.

“So, it’s essential that the underlying ‘why’ for the direction you’re going in is easily communicated and easily explainable,” he says.

4. Be flexible when you need to be

Traditionally, leadership teaching has focused on training leaders to adopt one leadership style and stick with it, be it transformational, visionary, democratic, authoritative or so on.

But in modern organisations, leaders need to be more flexible, Dr Jordan says.

“Because values-based leadership starts off in a different place, it can empower people to find that flexibility,” he explains.

“Rather than telling leaders to adhere to a single approach, we encourage students to identify the ‘essence’ of what’s important to them. They can then integrate that into their leadership in a way that allows them to respond to a range of different circumstances – and people.

“This is where study can complement experience. In the Griffith MBA, students are exposed to a wide range of leadership styles, so they are able to understand the different methodologies and consciously make those choices as needed.”

5. Remember most leaders are made not born

“Overwhelmingly, the evidence points to the conclusion that leaders are made not born,”

“We often hear the term ‘natural born leader’ to describe someone who has never undertaken any formal training; however, it is usually the case that person’s abilities have simply been honed through life and professional experience.

“Many of the vital skills for leadership – both practical and interpersonal – can be taught. These include communication, strategy, commercial and business skills, dealing with emotional ups and downs, and more. Our MBA program provides students with a robust toolkit.”

Dr Houghton agrees that becoming a leader is all about “learning the ropes”.

“When we talk about natural-born leaders, we observe traits such as being comfortable with ambiguity or dealing with conflict in a mature way. But these are also skills that can be learned, as well as practised. And this combination of learning and experience is what will make the difference to becoming a good, values-based leader over the long term."