Peter Handal, chief executive of Dale Carnegie Training, a leadership training company in New York City, believes effective leadership boils down to a handful of traits. He maintains that great leaders are brave enough to face challenging situations head-on and with honesty, which in turn builds trust with your employees. This is essential for a productive, as well as loyal, workplace. Building trust can be done in different ways: from taking an interest in your staff beyond work, to regularly discussing with them their career paths. But no matter how you decide to go about building trust, the important thing is to be authentic. It’s very important to use your strengths and personality traits to develop your personal leadership style.

Being authentic and trustworthy typically go hand in hand with conducting yourself in an ethical way, which in turn earns the respect of your employees, your fellow leadership team, and your customers, and is an essential element of leadership engagement.

Of course, there may be a preconceived idea that inspirational leaders must be overly enthusiastic in their approach to be successful. But in reality there are many different approaches that leaders can take that don’t necessarily rely on them being extraverts. They may create a compelling vision of the future, or they may meet with team members and build goals collectively. Or they may set certain challenging goals along with a deadline and drive the team forward that way. The very best leaders have the ability to master multiple approaches to get the very best out of their employees.

At naisA Global our interest is in whether leaders can learn to become more inspiring. We maintain that those with the right potential and drive, with the right support can develop themselves into first class inspirational leaders. And according to a study conducted by Zenger and Folkman, executives willing to improve their skills to inspire others made big strides (from the 42 percent to the 70 percent) over a three-year period, showing that when leaders with awareness, have good feedback at their disposal and a development plan built just for them, they can make significant inroads into learning this extremely important capability.