Three Qualities That Can Make You an Inspiring Leader
Some leaders inspire us and others infuriate us. Research around the world uncovers which characteristics matter.
By Adam Galinsky
Imagine you’re on a plane and suddenly hear an explosion. The whole plane rattles, and you see the left engine is on fire. After another loud noise, you realize there’s a hole in the side of the aircraft. As air rushes out, the plane is rapidly descending—over 20,000 feet in less than five minutes.
If you faced what passengers of Southwest Airlines 1380 experienced, you would probably do what they did: frantically write goodbye messages to your family and loved ones, thinking that these are your last moments on Earth.
But on that flight, the pilot, Captain Tammie Jo Shults, came on the intercom and said 10 simple words: “We’re not going down; we’re going to Philly.”
The passengers would later talk about how those 10 words were transformative, turning their panic into possibility. By sharing those 10 words, Captain Shults was helping her passengers make sense of their experience and reframe the dramatic descent, from “plummeting to Earth” to a planned and orchestrated path to safety.
As Captain Shults expertly landed the plane, she calmly and peacefully talked to air traffic control. After landing, she got up and went row by row, looking every passenger in the eye to make sure they were OK. People talked afterward about her words, her stature, and her empathy as she walked down that aisle.
Contrast Captain Shults’s experience with another captain who also dealt with a massive hole in his vessel, Francesco Schettino, captain of the Costa Concordia. Headed out on a seven-day cruise in the Mediterranean, the ship got too close to shore. It’s debatable why that happened: Captain Schettino claims he was saluting mariners on the shore; prosecutors claim he was trying to impress his mistress who was on board. But what isn’t in dispute is what happened next: The rocks tore a 115-foot hole in the side of the ship, which caused it to eventually capsize.
Before calling the Coast Guard, Captain Schettino spent time getting his story straight. The crash had caused an electrical blackout, but he was going to try to say that the blackout caused the crash. He tried to pin the responsibility on the helmsman. It took him almost an hour after the crash to sound the evacuation siren.
While people were frantically trying to find safety, Captain Schettino was nowhere to be found. Finally, the Coast Guard discovered him in a lifeboat—though Captain Schettino claimed that he “accidentally” fell into the lifeboat. But he also somehow fell out of his captain’s uniform. He was sitting in a lifeboat watching his boat sinking, hiding in civilian clothing. You can hear the outrage in the Coast Guard’s voice when he says in an audio recording, “I’m gonna make you pay for this.” And Captain Schettino did pay. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for manslaughter and abandoning ship.
These two people faced very similar situations. They were both captains, dealing with holes in the side of their vessels, but how they responded to their crises was completely different. Captain Shults helped people make sense of their experience. She was courageous, competent, and calm in landing the plane, and she compassionately connected to each of her passengers. In contrast, Captain Schettino caused the accident, refused to take any responsibility, and did not take any action to help his passengers save their lives. As a result of his selfish negligence, 32 people died, and numerous people were injured.
Why do some leaders create feelings of inspiration that percolate a wellspring of hope and possibility in others, while other leaders create seething cauldrons of infuriation and resentment? I’ve asked this question to tens of thousands of people across the globe, and here is what I learned about what makes a leader inspiring.
Three aspects of good leadership
My first big idea is that “inspiring” and “infuriating” leaders exist on an enduring continuum that is made up of three universal factors:
Being a visionary, how we see the world
Being an exemplar, how we are in the world
Being a mentor, how we interact in the world
We can inspire people in how we communicate, how we present ourselves, and how we interact with others—through our words, our actions, and our interactions.
My second big idea is that these are the three factors of inspiring leadership because each one fulfills a fundamental human need. Being visionary fulfills the fundamental need for meaning and understanding. That’s what Captain Shults provided when she said, “We’re not going down; we’re going to Philly.” She helped people make sense of their experience.
Being an exemplar fulfills the fundamental need for protection and passion. Captain Shults courageously protected her passengers with her calm and competence.
And being a mentor fulfills the fundamental human need for belonging and status. That’s what Captain Shults offered as she walked down the aisle: She made her passengers feel recognized and seen.
By surveying tens of thousands of people across the globe, I have found these three dimensions to be universal. There is not a single inspiring characteristic that is mentioned in one country that’s not mentioned in the dozens of countries in the world where I have collected data.
Visionaries
Effective visionaries not only offer a clear perspective on the world, but they also make their vision easy to follow and understand, and so engaging that it captures our attention.
The easiest way to make something easy is to make it simple. I call this the Inception Rule, after the movie Inception, where Leonardo DiCaprio tries to plant an idea in someone’s head during a dream. He discovers it’s not about how deep you go; it’s about how simple the idea is. As a leader, you want to constantly be thinking how to reduce your ideas to their simple core.
Another way that we can make things easy to understand is to repeat them, the way a chorus repeats in a song. The more people hear it, the more they will remember it.
Let’s consider Zoom’s vision: Delivering Happiness. It’s simple, and bubbly. But that vision is also deeply practical—it helped Zoom’s employees efficiently make high-stakes decisions during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic. As millions of people began using the product for the first time, Zoom needed to decide on its product’s baseline level of functionality. Too many features would overwhelm people, but too few features would stymie people. They needed the Goldilocks baseline of features to deliver happiness.
Similarly, delivering happiness led Zoom to invest heavily in customer service. Most of us know how much an hour-long wait for customer service can destroy happiness. So, Zoom hired many agents so wait times would be as short as possible.
To make our visions more engaging, we can use visual language. Andrew Carton, an associate professor of management at Wharton, did a study where people were told that a company’s mission was to either “make our customers satisfied” or “make our customers smile.” Then, he had people create a product. When they were working under the more visual vision (“smile”), they created more engaging products.
How to become more visionary: We can inspire people to be more visionary by having them reflect on their values. In one of my studies, we worked with a Swiss employment agency. When people came in to register for benefits, half of them were asked to reflect on their values, why those values mattered to them, and how they demonstrated them. For example, my own values include generosity, courage, and kaizen (a Japanese word for continued improvement).
Two months later, the people who had reflected on their values were twice as likely to have a job. The effects were so profound that the employment agency asked us to end our study and give everyone the reflection activity.
Exemplars
To be a great exemplar, the first thing you want to do is to consistently embody your vision; don’t be a hypocrite. As former CEO of PepsiCo Indra Nooyi once noted, “Don’t ask someone to do something that you wouldn’t do [yourself].”
Inspiring exemplars are calm and courageous protectors, like Captain Shults. And they show passion. When you ask someone to talk about a passion of theirs, their eyes light up, they smile a big beaming smile, they speak quickly and dramatically use their hands, and they lean in as if telling you a secret. When we are passionate about something, it’s revealed in our eyes, our mouth, our voice, and our bodies. And when you listen to someone’s passion, you smile, your eyes light up, and you feel the energy inside of you.
In my research on Dragon’s Den, which is a variant of Shark Tank, when entrepreneurs expressed more passion—in their eyes, their voice, their hands—they were dramatically more likely to receive funding. You can’t inspire others if you aren’t inspired.
How to become a better exemplar: Think about the moments in your life when you felt the most powerful and in control, your best self. Hundreds of studies around the world have used this technique that my colleagues Deb Gruenfeld, Joe Magee, and I created. We’ve even found that people are more likely to be selected for jobs if they’ve engaged in this reflection.
Mentors
Consider this proverb by Confucius: “Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand.” When you involve people, they feel seen and heard and they feel like people, not objects.
Inspiring leaders empower others everywhere across the globe. Even in cultures that are less individualistic than the United States—like Thailand or Saudi Arabia—there’s nothing more infuriating than when a boss micromanages you, rather than involves you or trusts you.
Inspiring leaders also elevate others. They share credit rather than steal credit, which is one of the most infuriating things that can happen at work. Finally, inspiring leaders empathize with others. They do what Captain Shults did, in making sure each of her passengers were OK, versus only thinking about themselves, like Captain Schettino.
How to become a better mentor: Reflect on the perspectives of others. My colleagues and I did a study with medical students who were tasked with diagnosing what was wrong with patients. Before meeting their patients, half the students were told to take the perspectives of their patients and to think about a recent time when they had engaged in perspective taking. Ultimately, the patients were more satisfied, trusting, and likely to follow the advice of the doctor who had been reminded to engage in perspective taking.
How to become an inspiring leader
My third big idea is that inspiring leaders aren’t just born; they’re also made. Because there is a universal set of inspiring attributes and behaviors, they can be practiced, nurtured, and developed.
My fourth big idea is that when you’re a leader, you don’t have the option of not having an impact. Your behavior is going to inspire or infuriate. I call this the “leader amplification effect.” Everything you say and do as a leader gets amplified. Your criticisms become humiliating criticisms, but your compliments become glorious praise.
My fifth big idea is that you can REIP what you sow. This phrase, drawn from the Bible, suggests that if we put inspiring energy out in the world, we receive inspiring energy in return. But my REIP is a homonym of reap, and it stands for reflect, emulate, intend, and practice:
Reflect on your own inspiring and infuriating experiences as a leader once a month.
Emulate: Identify the inspiring people in your life and think: How could I emulate them?
Intend: Turn these reflections into an explicit intention. What specific behavior can you commit to enacting or implementing?
Practice: Turn your intention into a daily practice.
My final big idea is that inspiring leaders think like architects. Like an architect who designs buildings to produce particular reactions and interactions, leaders design policies and practices that lead people down the inspiring path, even when they’re not present. So instead of just changing individual behavior, you can think about: How can you change a broader dynamic?
Thinking like an architect moves you from viewing a situation as a person problem—What’s wrong with this employee? —to start to think about what’s wrong in their environment, and how you can redesign that environment to help the employee be the best version of themselves.
Here’s one practice that Joseph Stagliano, president of NBT Bank, designed to inspire those around him. Although he has over 1,200 employees, he sends a birthday greeting to every single person. That sounds impossible, but he does it in 10 to 15 minutes over coffee every day.
The message is simple yet personalized. He showed me an example that said, “Hey Monica [pseudonym], Happy birthday! I hope you had a great weekend? How did track and bowling go?” Although his message was short, Monica’s response was extensive, overflowing with information and enthusiasm.
I shared that idea with the CEO of another company, and then a month later, he told me he started doing something similar. Every morning over coffee, he reached out to one person in his organization, and he expressed either gratitude or praise. He said he did this to put a skip in their step, but they ended up sending him such glowing replies that it put a skip in his step. The CEO reaped the inspiring energy he sowed. You can, too.