Empowering leader habits

Adrian Florescu
4 min readOct 2, 2019

Some people can get you up, some get you down.

Here’s a list of things that leaders do to make me feel empowered, motivated, and evolve:

Create safety

Nobody likes to come to work with fear. Fear of being wrong, making mistakes or being fired. I felt most productive in workplaces where making mistakes was not only allowed but encouraged.

You might say that making mistakes is not allowed in some fields. And you are right. But, instead of firing everyone who makes a mistake, find ways to stop the most common mistakes, like the “Surgical Safety Checklist” for example — a simple checklist that reduced the rate of deaths and surgical complications by more than one-third.

In software development, if a junior developer adds a bug in production it’s the senior developer’s fault that there is no testing added before pushing code to production. And, if that happens, it’s ok, it won’t happen again because now you understand the role of testing — you’ve learned from mistakes.

Teach

Sharing is caring. If I learned something quickly and with pleasure, it was from my leaders and colleagues.
But, like when a child learns to ride a bike and relies on you being behind him all the time, sometimes you have to let your team experiment on their own. It’s what the leaders I value do.

Empathize

Have you ever used the excuse of leaving work earlier to go to the dentist several times a month without having teeth problems? A leader would realize that you don’t go to the dentist but rather to interviews. Empathy helps communication and relationships.

The leaders I value know how to walk in my sneakers and also in their stakeholder's shoes.

Humble

When someone asks for help, I am more willing to help them if they say that they know what they want but they don’t know how to do it, rather than if they tell me exactly how and what to do.

As a leader, you need to know how to say “I don’t know” and ask for help.

Leading position can be easily demolished when trying to pretend to be what you’re not, or pretend that you know what you do not know.

Perhaps another keyword would be to be vulnerable. It creates the feeling of belonging — and then, followers are much more open to cooperate and help solve any problem.

Social

Authenticity, humor, maturity, openness.

Just like many other people, I’m very shy when I meet new people or join a new team.
Leaders I’ve met made me feel welcome which helped me build stronger relationships faster.

Build Culture

Set values, goals, and expectations.
Bring positivity, energy, and create a feeling of belonging.

These are some of the things that make me come up with a smile at work and be excited about what I’m going to do.

Nothing is written in stone

These are some of the key qualities I value in a leader, what do you value in leaders?

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