The internet is awash with guides about what the qualities of a leader should be. However, if you read most of them, you’ll find that there are common threads stretching through most of these guides that offer a more complete overview of great leadership qualities as a whole.

To examine these trends, we’ve decided to make a little ‘meta-analysis’ of what makes a good, ethical leader to help you create a better leadership development system for your staff members or improve your own leadership qualities, which will help your organization as a whole.

Don’t think leadership is important? Here’s what you get with strong leaders:

So, what are the qualities of a leader? What can we ascertain from all of these other articles?

Here’s a brief overview:

Qualities of a Leader

In general, according to most sources, the top qualities of a leader can be broken down like this:

• Awareness
• Humility and Empathy
• Focus and Curiosity
• Authenticity and Honesty
• Humor and Personality

Let’s dig into some details.

A Good Leader Is Aware

The first quality of a good leader is awareness. There are a ton of things that leaders have to be constantly aware of. For example, a good leader is aware of their staff, how they are perceived, how their actions impact the workforce, and have the self-awareness to examine their own actions, feelings, and more.

Basically, a good leader is aware of everything internally and externally.

“There is a difference between management and employees, bosses and workers. Leaders understand the nature of this difference and accept it; it informs their image, their actions, and their communication,” writes Peter Economy at Inc.

“They conduct themselves in a way that sets them apart from their employees — not in a manner that suggests they are better than others, but in a way that permits them to retain an objective perspective on everything that’s going on in their organization.”

Leaders also have to be aware of the business world they are involved in. What the current trends are, how the market is doing, what innovations are competitors coming up with. It’s a lot to think about, especially given how fast things change in the business world.

In all of this, though, good leaders are even more aware of themselves, ensuring that they are performing at their best. This also means that great leaders need to understand their own development so that they can continue learning and evolving.

The Importance of Humility and Empathy

When it comes to leading people, great leaders allow staff members to flourish, realizing that they do not have to know everything or have their hands in literally everything a company does. Leadership is not micromanaging and it’s not being a know-it-all. It’s about leading your staff to greatness and having an ego that can handle them being better than you at certain things.

Good leaders make those around them better. They can’t be self-serving in this pursuit, either. Being humble and empathetic can go a seriously long way.

“Humility doesn’t mean that you’re weak or unsure of yourself. It means that you have the self-confidence and self-awareness to recognize the value of others without feeling threatened,” writes Brian Tracy International.

“This is one of the rarer attributes — or traits — of good leaders because it requires containment of one’s ego.”

This means that great leaders let things go. Ego needs to be harnessed so that employees can shine, which means your business will shine as well.

Humility goes hand-in-hand with empathy because an empathetic leader gives their employees praise while also helping them through their problems, understanding that everyone has their struggles in business and life. These issues shouldn’t be punished, they should be fixed with the help of a good leader.

On the other hand, when an employee does great work, leaders should celebrate them publicly, giving everyone involved a morale boost. Having a leader that has, and shows, both humility and empathy makes them easy to work with and a person that is willing to help employees while keeping their ego out of the equation.

In the end, it’s all about the staff and not the leader.

Great Leaders Are Focused and Curious

The best leaders among us are always learning. Lifelong learning is vital if leaders want to continue staying at the cutting-edge of their industries while also maintaining their own personal development plans. And to pull that off, leaders also need to be focused.

“Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided,” writes Daniel Goleman with the Harvard Business Review.

Focus can often be misunderstood. The common way we talk about it is that to be a focused person you have to be completely absorbed in tasks, allowing you to shrug off distractions. This isn’t necessarily true, though.

To be a focused leader, you have to know what to focus on — what to give your attention to. We all only have a limited amount of time in the day so it’s vital for great leaders to be able to figure out what needs their attention and what can be handled by other staff members.

When it comes to curiosity, a focused leader can spend their energy learning new things, bringing those new ideas to the organization, and using them to help their staff achieve more. Staying curious and having the ability to focus on what’s important will allow continuous development across the board, making it one of the best qualities of a leader.

The Power of Authenticity and Honesty

No one likes a person that is dishonest, especially when it comes to the workplace. A dishonest boss makes it a lot harder to get tasks done and undermines credibility across the board.

“Strong leaders treat people the way they want to be treated. They are extremely ethical and believe that honesty, effort, and reliability form the foundation of success,” continues Peter Economy from Inc.

“They embody these values so overtly that no employee doubts their integrity for a minute. They share information openly, and avoid spin control.”

This also means that leaders cannot be fake. They can’t try to be what they aren’t because staff members can and will see through the guise. If an employee knows their boss from work and then goes out with them for dinner or to an event and they behave differently, that employee will start to not trust the leader, viewing them as a liar instead of a person to lean on.

“It continues to surprise me how many leaders attempt to be one way at work, while their “true” personality emerges outside of work,” writes Kevin Kruse with Forbes.

“Once a CEO reminded me, “Leadership is acting.” And it surprises me when these same leaders seem shocked or confused when their employees don’t trust them, don’t like them, and can’t really wait to work elsewhere.”

However, if a leader is completely honest and authentic, the staff will be more inclined to view them as a leader and act accordingly.

It’s important to note, though, that being honest doesn’t mean a leader can be downright mean. This is where awareness comes in. If a leader knows how they are being perceived, how their employees see them, they can figure out how to talk with him, give them criticism, and hear their problems. As you can see, a lot of these leadership qualities merge together and center around the leader doing what’s best for the team instead of themselves.

Don’t Forget to Add Some Humor

Is there anything more humanizing than sharing a joke. Laughing together and not taking everything too seriously can go along way if leaders want their employees to feel comfortable around them.

This is because humor is a great ice breaker when done correctly. We’re not saying that you have to be like Michael Scott from The Office who tries — and fails — to always be the funniest guy in the room. What we are saying, though, is that humor — specifically humor that shows you are humble — can go a long way.

“In leaders, humor and humility seem to go hand in hand. They’re like a counterbalance for self-confidence, something that keeps their feet on the ground and their egos in check,” reports Steve Tobak from CBS.

“Just remember, there’s a time and a place for everything. A little self-deprecating humor or a funny quip between executives in private is one thing. Joking at the expense of others or crazy rants that make people wonder what you put in your coffee is another story.”

Like Tobak says, humor is a great way for leaders to be humble. You just have to make sure you are using humor the correct way, which means that making jokes about yourself is generally okay but if you’re trying to roast all of your staff members like a Comedy Central show, you need to calm down.

Qualities of Leaders: What We Can Learn

So, what can we learn from all of these different qualities? Well, it’s obvious that many of these leadership qualities piggyback on one another. For example, in order to be a humble, authentic leader, you need to be aware of how you’re perceived and how your staff feels. This also means that good leaders are empathetic and focused, letting their staff handle their own jobs while knowing what needs focused on.

In concert, all of these attributes point to a person who can enable and empower those around them while keeping their own ego in check. A self learner who knows that they do not know everything, and a person who is willing to work with others through problems while celebrating successes along the way.

If you can pull these qualities of a leader together, your staff will perform better, which — at the end of the day — is what all great business leaders should want. The most important takeaway is to remember that great leaders lead. They don’t make everything about themselves. Your job, as a leader, is to boost everyone around you.

This article was originally published on the Careerminds Blog. Read the original here.

Qualities of a Leader: What Do Most Leaders Have in Common? was originally published in Careerminds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’ve ever been working hard at a task, trying to get it done by a deadline, you probably know just how infuriating constant interruptions can be.

Not only do these interruptions make it hard to complete the task at hand, they also can derail your entire day. The good news is that researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Minnesota have discovered a way to get you back on track in only a few minutes.

The team, led by Sophie Leroy from the University of Washington, found that having a ‘ready-to-resume’ strategy — a plan of action to handle random interruptions — can allow people to completely pivot to the new task and then completely pivot back to the old one, giving them both attention instead of trying to split your attention into two different areas. By splitting your time, you actually perform worse at both tasks, which is obviously no good.

“It’s like Windows staying open in our brains, and it makes it hard to focus on the intervening work,” Leroy said.

“As I am still thinking about Task A while trying to do Task B, I don’t have the cognitive capacity to process those two tasks at the same time and do a perfect job on both tasks. It’s not cognitively possible.”

Basically, if you think of your brain like a desktop computer, it’s easy to see how leaving a bunch of tasks — or, as Leroy would called them in this analogy, ‘windows’ — open at one time eats up how much mental energy you have for all of them.

The solution, then, is to fully close those mental ‘windows’, moving to the new task with a plan to return — fully — to it when the new task is complete. The trick of all of this is to make sure you have a plan, an actual plan, to make your return to that task.

According to the University of Washington:

“The ready-to-resume plan needn’t be long or elaborate, Leroy said. Even a minute’s work will do, to note where you left off, and, as Leroy and Glomb write, ‘where to resume, what challenges are left, and/or what actions (you) must postpone but resume later.’”

So, according to the study, all you need to do is to note where you were and create small plan to get back on task so you don’t have to waste the mental energy trying to figure out where you were, which will allow you to complete a task instead of keeping hundreds of them all in a state of flux.

Leroy tested her hypothesis by conducting four studies.

The first study looked into how 202 professionals handled interruptions. The second examined how workers worked on one task while getting interrupted with another. Leroy found that without a plan to return to the original task, the workers kept thinking about the first task while doing the second, creating a rift in their thinking.

Finally, the last two studies examined the benefits of using a ready-to-resume strategy using resume reading and retention as the tasks.

In the end, Leroy and her team found that a ready-to-resume plan allowed the participants to better complete the original task after being interrupted, which could point to a solution for all of us to employ when we are interrupted at work.

“What I show is that people who have done the ready-to-resume plan make better decisions, and recall more information from those resumes that they just read,” Leroy said.

“It’s an improvement in performance, both in quality of information retained and in the ability to make decisions with complex information.”

Leroy also noted that they did not examine how well the interruption task was performed using the ready-to-resume strategy, though she believes it stands to reason that the strategy wouldn’t work for that task, too. Further research will be needed to fully understand it.

The takeaway here is that our minds work better when we take a second — or a minute — to gather ourselves so we can complete each task fully.

“We have to proactively manage the way we transition between tasks to help our attention be more focused and less distracted or divided among everything we have on our plate,” Leroy concludes.

“The ready-to-resume plan is one simple way to help when dealing with frequent interruptions. In doing so, we actually also help the person who interrupts — because we will be more present in that interaction and our input will be of higher quality.”

Leroy’s research will soon be published in Organizational Science.

This article was originally published on the Careerminds blog. Read the original here.

How to Handle Workplace Interruptions, According to Science was originally published in Careerminds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions — commonly called M&A — the whole process can be quite confusing and stressful. After all, employees will be wondering if their jobs are in jeopardy and HR has a ton of different tasks ahead of them. To help take some of the stress out of the equation, we’re going to go over the four most common types of mergers found in the corporate world.

First off, what is a merger? What happens when companies come together in the first place? Why would a company want to merger with another one?

Well, there are many reasons for companies to merger, forming a larger, more powerful organization. These reasons are largely what dicates what type of merger the action is labeled as.

“A merger is an agreement that unites two existing companies into one new company,” reports Investopedia.

“Mergers and acquisitions are commonly done to expand a company’s reach, expand into new segments, or gain market share. All of these are done to please shareholders and create value.”

So, though a merger seems like a troubling move for companies on paper, it’s actually a solid business move that both companies will — if done correctly — benefit from.

The weird thing is that mergers are far more complicated than that just two companies deciding to come together. With any sort of a huge business move, there are different categories that mergers can fall into.

Let’s dig in a bit to make sure we understand each of these different types of mergers:

The Horizontal Merger

The first type of merger we’re going to look into is ‘horizontal.’

A horizontal merger is when two companies who sell the same product or cater to the same demographic come together to increase their reach. Typically, this type of merger is done between direct competitors.

The best way to think about horizontal mergers is to look at how startup companies get acquired by larger companies either to absorb their technology — which can be used by the larger company to fill a gap they have — or because they are posing a threat and have somehow captured part of the market that the bigger company has been trying to figure out.

It’s important to note, though, that this type of merger must happen between two companies with similar products, customers, and target market. Otherwise, you end up with a completely different type of merger.

The Vertical Merger

Unlike horizontal mergers, vertical ones aim to capture more of the means of production than expanding their market cap by merging with competitors or innovators in their niche.

Basically, a vertical merger is when one company merges with a company that is better at one step of their process.

“A vertical merger joins two companies that may not compete with each other, but exist in the same supply chain,” explains the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA).

“An automobile company joining with a parts supplier would be an example of a vertical merger. Such a deal would allow the automobile division to obtain better pricing on parts and have better control over the manufacturing process. The parts division, in turn, would be guaranteed a steady stream of business.”

In other words, if you should own a company that makes shoes, you probably would benefit from merging with a company that makes rubber, or a company that makes fabrics. By doing so, you will be able to make your product for a cheaper price by controlling more of the supply chain, which — in effect — gives you a huge competitive advantage.

The Concentric Merger

Concentric mergers are closely related to horizontal mergers because they both aim to complete the same goal: a larger market cap.

However, concentric mergers happen when a company merges with another company that sells products to the same customers, though they sell different products, making them indirect competitors.

“The companies involved in a congeneric merger are typically engaged in complementary, not directly competitive activities,” explains Natasha Gilani from Bizfluent.

“The companies involved in a congeneric merger are typically engaged in complementary, not directly competitive activities.”

Here’s an example:

Say company A sells printers for home offices. It makes complete sense for them to then merger with a company that produces ink or paper. Not only are the same customers buying all of their products, they are buying at the same exact time. So if the bigger printer company owns the paper company and the ink company, all of the companies involved should benefit from coming together.

The Conglomerate Merger

The final common type of merger is when two or more companies come together who do not compete at all. This usually happens with giant companies that work in many different areas of expertise.

Think of some of the biggest companies working today. Your General Electrics, Disney’s, etc.

GE is a great example, according to Point Park University, because they work in tons of different areas from aviation to healthcare to household products to various gizmos. GE seemingly does it all and they were able to pull that off by acquiring other companies that specialized in these fields.

But what would make a company want to start working in so many different areas? After all, that seems to be a challenge — and it is.

“There are several reasons as to why a company may go for a conglomerate merger. Among the more common reasons are adding to the share of the market that is owned by the company and indulging in cross selling,” reports Economy Watch.

“The companies also look to add to their overall synergy and productivity by adopting the method of conglomerate mergers.”

This type of merger is definitely harder to pull off and sometimes does fail spectacularly. However, the companies that can and do pull them off become juggernauts of industry.

What Do All These Types of Mergers Have in Common?

Given that there are so many different types of mergers and acquisitions out there, it makes sense that there are laws out there that govern what companies can and cannot do. This is largely because big mergers have the power to impact the overall market, possibly leading to monopolies and other things that are bad for business.

There are three major antitrust laws that dictate how mergers can go down. Here’s what the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has to say:

“Congress passed the first antitrust law, the Sherman Act, in 1890 as a “comprehensive charter of economic liberty aimed at preserving free and unfettered competition as the rule of trade.” In 1914, Congress passed two additional antitrust laws: the Federal Trade Commission Act, which created the FTC, and the Clayton Act. With some revisions, these are the three core federal antitrust laws still in effect today.”

Going into every one of these laws and what they impact is for another article entirely. However, if you’re curious, you can read all about these various laws on the FTC’s site here.

Want to learn more about the different types of mergers? Check out our mergers & acquisitions guide here:

This article was originally published on the Careerminds blog. Read the original here.

Refresher: The Four Types of Corporate Mergers was originally published in Careerminds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Pied Piper is one of those stories that you read as a child that seems to pop up in everyday conversations far more often than you probably thought it would all those years ago.

This is largely because the simple story serves as a pretty good reminder that you should pay your debts, keep your promises, and stop messing around with magic pipe-wielding people that show up in your town no matter what they claim they can do about your current rat problem.

And, while all three of those things are true — especially the last one — the Pied Piper tale also serves as a warning for business leaders, too. Or does it?

Before we get into it, though, we need a quick refresher on the legend. So buckle up, here comes a brief history lesson:

The Pied Piper: A Quick Recap

While many experts are still unsure when the story originated, evidence — in the form of a stained glass window — suggests that it came about sometime before the 1300s in Hamelin, Germany, the same town where the story is set.

In the original tale, the town of Hamelin has a rat problem, which prompts the mayor to hire a rat-catcher who claims he can lure the rats out of the town and into the river with his trusty magical flute.

To get a sense of the man himself, here’s how Robert Browning, in his poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin, describes him:

“Please your honors,” said he, “I’m able, / By means of a secret charm, to draw / All creatures living beneath the sun, / That creep or swim or fly or run, / After me so as you never saw! / And I chiefly use my charm / On creatures that do people harm, / The mole and toad and newt and viper; / And people call me the Pied Piper.”

(Fun fact: ‘pied’ means wearing more than one color at a given time. For some reason, we barely use that term anymore.)

To everyone’s surprise, the Piper is successful, drawing out all of the rats and having them drowned in a river nearby. Then, for some weird reason, the mayor decides that he doesn’t like the original deal and tries to pay the Piper less than they agreed upon (in some versions he doesn’t pay him at all).

This upsets the Piper who then — like a maniac — uses his magical flute to lure all of the town’s children into a forest (or a cave or a mountain or Transylvania, depending on what story you’re reading).

In total, many of the stories say that the Piper led 130 children from the town while the adults were busy in church. Only three of the town’s children did not come because one was deaf and unable to hear the flute, one was hurt and couldn’t keep up, and the last was blind and couldn’t find the way. When the adults came out of church, these three children broke the news to them.

There are typically three endings to the story, too. One is that the children were led to their deaths like the rats were, one is that they were returned after payment was made, and the other is that they were returned after the villagers paid way more than the agreed upon price.

Given the story’s long history, it’s changed quite a bit. In fact, no one really knows why it came about. We do know — based on written records — that the church of Hamelin had a depiction of the Piper on one of its stained glass windows that dates back to the 1300s.

Also, the town of Hamelin started to record history after whatever event took place with the Piper. In 1384, an ominous note was left in the town’s chronicle that read: “It is 100 years since our children left.”

Okay, that’s super spooky. So, what does this have to do with business? Good question, let’s root this thing in some facts.

The Pied Piper Might Have Been a Talent Scout or Head Hunter

You read that right. According to new evidence proposed by linguistics professor Jurgen Udolph, from the University of Gottingen, the Pied Piper might have actually been a “locator,” which would have been the name given to a person who went around looking for young adults to come work in other towns.

In other words, the Pied Piper was likely a talent scout.

“They were recruited in their home towns and villages by “locators” — the medieval equivalent of head-hunters,” reports Imre Karacs for The Independent.

“‘Go east, young man,’ they preached on village squares, promising rich rewards for colonists. Documents going back five centuries show that on 26 June 1284, Hameln lost 130 young souls.”

While this firmly roots the story of the Pied Piper in the business world. A talent scout is never what’s on someone’s mind when they attribute someone a “Pied Piper-like magic”. When we call leaders Pied Pipers, it’s usually because they wield an impressive amount of influence over their staff.

And this is where the true problem comes in.

The Pied Piper Effect

In business, strong leaders are invaluable. In fact, some of them seem to have a Pied Piper-like magic to them where their team will follow them so loyally it seems unreal.

If you have Pied Piper-like leaders in your company, it stands to reason that your company will flourish under their guidance, right? Well, the 6 Sigma organization seems to think so.

“So, too, effective leaders must possess, a Pied Piper-like ”magic”, that enables them to call the tune heralding strategy change, confident in the knowledge that the vast majority will follow their lead,” the organization states.

“This, ‘Pied Piper’ ability to influence others is perhaps the most essential skill a leader can have. Even in normal circumstances, when major change is not an issue, a leader without followers is a contradiction in terms, so all leaders, to some extent, must be Pied Pipers.”

According to them, Pied Piper leaders must possess these characteristics:

• Charisma
• Believability
• The ability to inspire loyalty
• The ability to positively make use of channels of influence within the organization
• Top communication skills and
• Skills in turning around dissenters and enlisting pioneers

While it’s easy to see how having those qualities can make a leader have power, it also sounds a bit militaristic doesn’t it? “Dissenters.” That’s a pretty weird word to be throwing around a boardroom.

This is because Pied Piper leaders are not merely looked up to by their peers, they can directly influence them. So, in a way, yes, Pied Piper leadership does make a good military commander or head of state. In fact, there have been articles written about how the Pied Piper effect works within terror organizations.

To boil this all down, Pied Piper leadership is all about having an immense influence on people. So much so, that it’s like you have a magical control over them.

This begs the question: is a Pied Piper a good thing to have in your company?

When Pied Piper-ing Goes Awry

Now, if you’re the boss of one of these Pied Pipers and they have a team behind them that works hard, gets jobs done, and generally don’t cause a fuss, you probably see nothing but positives when it comes to this type of leadership.

And, you’d be generally right. If things go well, your Pied Piper might keep chugging along, making sweet, sweet profits.

But that’s ignoring the other half of the story.

We seem to only look at the one side of the myth, applauding the Piper’s magical leadership talents while forgetting that he then, you know, kidnapped a bunch of children using the same flute he used to save the city from rats.

So, if we view the Piper’s flute as his leadership skills, it stands to reason that we like the Piper when he is using the flute to make us money, bring teams together, and save our towns from rats, but if we wrong the Piper, he turns around and uses that same flute to destroy our businesses and — in the story — our lives.

How can this play out in the business world?

Okay, let’s separate the myth from reality here. You have a strong leader who knows they are strong. They are self-aware enough to realize that they are in a position of authority and power over their given team.

Now, say that leader wants a raise or has some other request that you can’t fulfill. What do you do? In other words, can you pay the Piper?

If you can’t, you might have a problem on your hands because the Piper in this scenario wields a massive influence over their staff, possibly turning them against you.

If the Piper leaves your company to work for a competitor, for example, do his ex-staffer look to you to fill the role or will he — like in the story — march them out of the company behind him?

This example can play out many ways. Say the Piper gets laid off because his position was redundant. Will his staff stay or will they go, too? Will they start to “dissent”?

Obviously, the solution here is to be a Piper yourself, which is why the 6 Sigma folks have an article about it. And, while that is logical advice, you should attempt to run an organization that isn’t so polarizing in the first place.

The employees of your company shouldn’t rally behind one single individual. They should rally around your company as a whole. After all, a company is just one, really large team. If they are not onboard with that idea and are instead following a single person, you have some organizational workforce issues happening internally that need addressed.

Pied Piper: Good or Bad?

The takeaway here is that Pied Piper leadership — while it seems amazing on the surface because, well, it is, can also be a double edged sword.

If you foster strong leaders, it’s important that you also foster company loyalty, too. Make everyone a part of the same team.

Pied Pipers, in other words, are powerful things, and we shouldn’t forget the latter half of the myth if we are telling ourselves that leaders should try to evoke that level of influence, which seems to be a common piece of advice given how many articles there are about ‘Pied Piper Leaders’.

Just remember: at the end of the day, someone has to pay the Piper, and if your organization is not up to the task (or simply falters enough to trigger the Piper to action) you can find yourself in a weird spot.

This article was originally published on the Careerminds blog. Read the original here.

The Pied Piper Effect: What an 800-Year-Old Myth Teaches About Business Leadership was originally published in Careerminds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.