Five Leadership Traits for Engaged and Empowered Teams

Last week, I have been spending significant time getting clarity about the leadership traits that I value most. I have been focused on this is because I have been developing the leadership training that we will be offering across Computer Services in order to develop the traits that will create an engaged and empowered culture to elevate the effectiveness and happiness of our teams.
My executive coach suggested that I pay attention to what I value in the leaders around me and to narrow the number of traits to five. Being able to limit the number is important because the computer services team cannot focus on everything.
I asked for input from my senior management team and they listed many important and valuable traits. There were a lot more than five on that combined list. Narrowing the list has been difficult.
As I was wrestling with what was most important. I found that it was easier to describe behaviors that I wanted to stop and much more difficult to describe succinctly those traits that set apart the leaders I admire. I was struggling and started to feel quite overwhelmed and tired thinking about trying to accomplish the culture shift that the computer service staff is asking for.
At the bequest of my coach, I wrote a positive intention about the impact the Computer Services team would have if each member embraced the different traits. That exercise helped me hone in on the leadership traits that would be most impactful and left me excited, energized, and hopeful.
The traits that I settled on incorporated many of the attributes that the senior management team indicated were important to them. They are curiosity, positivity, collaboration, execution and integrity.
To be curious investigate, embrace new ideas, experiment, and learn from failures. To be positive view obstacles as opportunities and cultivate gratitude and kindness. To be collaborative actively engage others to craft innovative solutions and inform decisions. Execution is being able to get things done and hold ourselves and others accountable. To have integrity act with honesty, authenticity, transparency, courage, and respect.
These traits build trust, teamwork, flexibility, and confidence, which are important to the computer services members. As I have grown in my own leadership journey, these traits have been most transformative to me. To create a more engaged and empowered culture, I have relied on these attributes in my short time at Temple and am getting a lot of feedback that it is working. In the coming weeks, I will be taking time to describe each one of these traits in more detail.
Mastery of these traits is a journey, not a destination, but the journey for me has been amazing and fun. My challenge to you this week is to start noticing when you or others around you are displaying any of these traits.