Comments on: Qualities of a good leader in a recession: Your view?

By: Echtogammut

Echtogammut — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:25:24 +0000

I think level headedness under pressure is key to these times. There is nothing worse than a leader who is panicing and making irrational decisions, all the while trying to pretend he knows what he is doing. A good leader needs to choose employees he trusts and believe that they know what they are doing. He also needs to understand he is not an expert in everything and his employees know more than he does in their own areas of expertice. If your employees believe in your company, openess and honesty will go far. Not understanding or knowing the skills your employees have seems to be the norm amongst most leaders. Worse are leaders who believe their employee’s are incapable of doing their job, so they always ask for outside “experts”. Having worked on both sides of that equation, I can honestly say that always leads to disaster.

By: KJH

KJH — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:34:47 +0000

I can’t help but also think about public leadership – damaging situations state & federal government leaders have helped create are no different than those in the private sector.

Bottom line: Leadership goals must get back to basics; leading to do the right thing, and transition away from the popularity contest/salesman mentality and “one with the most money wins” attitude that’s been glamorized for too long. Okay, so I’m upset about current affairs, who isn’t?

Thought: A person’s personality plays a key role in being a good (or bad) leader, obviously, however, the other part of the equation that’s worth putting forth effort is building good leaders in younger generations using media, community, in the household and education collectively. I believe that could make a huge difference going forward from here.

By: Nottslanding

Nottslanding — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:39:58 +0000

Two very valuable qualities in leaders and employees are creativity and systems thinking. Difficult times, when “business as usual” isn’t like it used to be, require keen assessment of a myriad of relationships and the ability to respond in innovative ways – guided by experience, of course – but enlightened by new possibilities. Enlist the assistance of creative systems thinkers in filling positions, and set the expectation in the workplace.

By: AminAdatia

AminAdatia — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:17:30 +0000

A good leader will carefully review the kinds of expertise being asked for in an employee/contractor. Not much good qulaity will be found looking for combinations that would make little sense such as Oracle DBA (expert) MS SQL Server (expert) and DB2 (expert) with SQL, Java, ETL, DW, BI, .Net, Unix, Windows also at the expert level.