Leadership Traits

Think of a leader.  It doesn’t have to be someone you personally know.  It can be, but George Patton, Martin Luther King Jr., Alexander the Great, Jane Addams, and Bill Belichick are leaders, as well.  Think of a leader and think of 3-4 traits that they exhibit that makes them a good leader.  What are the adjectives that describe their leadership skills?

Winston Friggin' Churchill
By J. Russell & Sons [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This all relates to a lecture that I have and occasionally give about leadership.  It is specifically about the different academic theories of leadership and how leadership is viewed by academics – sociologists, psychologists, and those kinds of people - rather than a how-to, skills based leadership class.  In the lecture, I explain that one of the earliest theories used to explain the process of leadership is what is called the “traits approach.”  In short, it looks at what traits successful leaders have.  

It should be pointed out that leadership is separate from management and administration.  You don’t have to be a leader to be a manager, administrators are not necessarily leaders, and so on.  The three roles are separate.  That is why leadership is non-positional.  The most influential leaders in your organization may be regular line medics.

Anyway, the traits approach to describing leadership began in the 19th Century, but took off in a scholarly sense after World War II.  Right after the war, the United States took detailed retrospective looks at what was done during the war; what was done right, where improvement could be found, and such.  They looked at strategic bombing raids, why some men kill and others don’t, why some leaders were more successful than others, and dozens of other questions.  

In 1948, one of the first academic (rigorous and peer reviewed) pieces was published.  Stodgill published a meta-analysis of 124 other studies of leader traits.¹  The main traits he found to be common in successful leaders were: 
     -intelligence
     -alertness to the needs of others
     -insight into situations
     -responsibility
     -initiative
     -persistence
     -self-confidence  
Stodgill updated his meta-analysis in 1974 with an additional 163 studies.²  The updated traits seem to have been influenced by the 1960s: 
     -drive for responsibility and task completion
     -vigor and persistence in goal pursuit
     -creative problem solving
     -stress absorption
     -social initiative
     -self-confidence
     -accepting of decision consequences
     -toleration of frustration and delay
     -capacity for group organization  
The search for traits is still being continued in more recent studies, as well.³

Compare the two lists.  Was intelligence not needed in 1974, as it was in 1948?  Of course not.  So why is it on one list and not the other?    

Do you have to be intelligent to be a politician?  I would argue that the opposite is the most beneficial option when considering politics as a career.

Is it vital for a CEO to be accepting of the consequences of her decisions?

One thing that is missing from both lists is being skilled at whatever the people you are leading are doing.  Is it important to be a good football player in order to be an inspirational, competent football coach?  Seriously, think about that one.

Why in the name of all that is good and holy is integrity not on either list?!?

The problem is that looking for common traits among skilled leaders is a non-starter.  It doesn’t work like that.  Have you ever met a bad leader with self-confidence?  Self-confidence is present is good and bad leaders, just like self-doubt is present in good and bad leaders.  There is no sensitivity or specificity to the traits – they are too generalized.  In addition, this approach to describing leadership isn’t culturally varied.  (Bear with me, I know EMS folk get glassy-eyed talking about 'culture.'  But I mean culture in a micro sense, like the culture between the fire service and Greenpeace being different.)  Does a leader require the exact same traits to lead an infantry platoon in war as a leader starting up a homelessness non-profit would require?  Of course not.  Finally, do you think you need different skills to convince a group of subordinates to charge a machine gun nest compared to the skills to convince people to fill out their TPS reports differently?  Different situations require different traits.   So the attempt to describe leadership as a collection of leader traits hits a brick wall.  

But in EMS, it seems like we really, really want it to be true.  

What is the one trait we look for in our leaders?  Skillful, experienced paramedic.  Wait.  I guess that counts as two traits.

Granted, “skillful paramedic” probably includes intelligence, problem solving abilities, decision making skills, and other traits.  But you don’t have to be the fighter pilot with the most kills in order to run the Air Force.  An army doesn’t make the best tank driver the general.  I have no idea whether Dwight Eisenhower could hit the broad side of a barn with a Garand, but he led a coalition of soldiers across Europe.  Who cares if he could shoot, that wasn’t his skill set.  Most organizations identify potential leaders early in their careers.  Future leaders are even hired separate from line workers.  The organization advances their levels of responsibility slowly, and trains the shit out of the potential leaders at every level with specific leadership and management skills.  In many fields, cross pollination occurs - a manager at Coca Cola can be hired by General Motors, rather than GM being forced to promote from within.  Some days, I wish we did things like that more in EMS.  

The manager being groomed at Coca Cola doesn't have to lead paramedics.  Knowing my peers and coworkers, their alpha personalities and remote worksites, their downtime, their stress levels, the expectations of their jobs, and their feelings towards authority, it almost seems like you are setting up failure if you don't specifically give a new leader tools, education, training, and mentorship.  A newly made supervisor (I love that term - made - seems like the mob) should be devouring leadership and management books like s/he was devouring medical books immediately after paramedic school.  

If you’ve ever had a skillful leader as a boss in EMS (and, amazingly, I have had many), remember that it is probably through blind luck or personal talent rather than through a process of development and skillset training.  

I work in an agency that gives new leaders those tools, and I am especially glad for it.

1. Stogdill, RM. Personal factors associated with leadership: A survey of the literature. Journal of Psychology 1948; 25: 35–71.

2. Stogdill, RM. Stodgill’s Handbook of Leadership. New York: Free Press; 1974.

3. Along with the Wikipedia bibliography, see: Hoffman, BJ, Woehr, DJ, Maldagen-Youngjohn, R., & Lyons, BD. Great man or great myth? A quantitative review of the relationship between individual differences and leader effectiveness. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. 2011; 84(2): 347-381.