These days finding a strong powerful leading woman isn't hard. While it hadn't been hard before, these days women have even more opportunities to express themselves, to lead, and to inspire others. No wonder so many young women look up to them and want to become like them in the future.
But in order to do so, one needs to understand what exactly does makes these women so strong and able to change the world around them. Which of their traits helped them become so successful and take on leadership roles?
Maybe you want to find this out to write a cause and effect essay on this topic. Maybe you want to do so because your dream is to become a strong female leader. Either way, you can find more about the traits of successful women from this article.
1. Confidence.
In order to lead people, you need them to believe in you - and they won't do so unless you believe in yourself and your abilities.
Some people mistake confidence for overconfidence or bragging but it's not like that. On the contrary, confident people don't have the need to prove themselves to the others by saying how skilled and successful they are. However, they believe that they are able to make significant changes and that they do have all the necessary skills to create something important.
Building up your confidence if you don't have it yet isn't easy - but it's possible. You can do so by acknowledging your strong sides, praising yourself for your successes, and asking people around you to give you feedback. You also need to learn how to take care of yourself - and that's another important trait of female leaders.
2. Self-care.
Self-care is more important than you might think. It allows you to know your strengths and resources well enough and to learn how to use them without stressing yourself out too much.
When it comes to finding your confidence and embracing it, self-care is crucial too. It's nearly impossible to build confidence when you punish yourself for every flaw and small mistake you make. While taking care of yourself doesn't mean that you take everything too lightly, it still means that you know how to distinguish big mistakes from small ones and try to fix them instead of stressing too much and blaming yourself.
3. Creativity.
Creativity is the thing that allows good leaders become great ones eventually. This ability to create new ideas, to find innovative problem solutions, to be free to experiment is what makes the leaders lead their companies to profit.
It's much easier for a creative person to develop an innovative product or a new approach that eventually could turn out to be more successful than previous one. Just like many other traits, creativity can be developed - however, it might require a lot of work.
To become creative you need to learn how to overcome your fears of failure and other negative feelings, how to learn from your mistakes instead of trying to avoid them. This might seem hard but that's what can lead you to success eventually.
4. Persistence.
As I already mentioned, the challenges are inevitable for any business and for any leader. Great leaders, however, don't stop despite things might not always go as planned. They believe in what they create and know when it's time to back away and when it's time to push further and achieve their goals.
Such attitude along with hard work is the best inspiration for people around you. True leaders don't ask people to do things they don't do themselves - no, they lead by example and demonstrate both optimism and persistence.
5. Help and compassion.
Women are known not only for their strength and willpower but also for their compassion. If a leader embraces this trait, they could actually achieve an even greater result.
Why? Well, because a great leader doesn't look for a way to get into the spotlight and take all the credits for the team's action. On the contrary, such leader does their best to help the others shine, to let them express themselves and achieve great results within the company.
Moreover, compassionate leaders are constantly looking for the ways to benefit humanity with the help of their work. They donate to charity and try to make their projects not simply useful but socially important as well.
They don't work against people - they work with them, listening to what they have to say and acknowledging their ideas if they are good. This what can benefit an organization a lot as often employees have some valuable insights on the things going on in a company and so are able to come up with great ideas and solutions.
6. Opportunity-driven.
Knowing how to overcome challenges is indeed important but knowing how to seize the opportunities is even more important.
Great leaders know when to stand their ground but this doesn't make them inflexible. On the contrary, they understand clearly that sometimes you need to learn how to benefit from various changes, even if they are obviously unpleasant.
For example, in times of financial crisis, it's always better to give samples of products before encouraging people to buy them. This will give them an opportunity to try your products or services and see whether they are worth investing in. This will also help you build trustworthy relations with your customers.
Various innovative products or service don't appear out of anywhere: often they are created because there's a demand that has to be met or the circumstances that companies react to. If you tailor your mind to see an opportunity in literally everything, you'll be able to come up with such solutions as well.
Women in Leadership
Both men and women can be great leaders - and so it isn't surprising that most of these traits are common for them. Summing this up, one of the best ways to become a great leader is to learn how to build up your strong traits and how to make the most out of your intuition, compassion, and optimism.
Ms. Career Girl was started in 2008 to help ambitious young professional women figure out who they are, what they want and how to get it.