You’ve heard it before: people don’t leave companies. They leave bad managers. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, one in two employees has fled from a bad manager. If that’s not a concerning statistic to you, it should be. Mediocre leaders can make or break your business.

But what’s the difference between a manager, a boss, and a leader? A leader and a great leader? Leadership is the way that good managers earn the trust of their team.

Research has shown that there are a number of key leadership behaviours that managers can learn and develop. These behaviours are grounded in managing our social-emotional reactions to our surroundings. And by cultivating them, leaders can build a team around them that is accountable, trusting, resilient, proactive, and passionate about their work and company mission.

If you want to be this type of leader (and cultivate this type of leadership in your organisation), here are the 5 leadership behaviours our research has shown can have the biggest impact on your team’s productivity and engagement, and ways to practice them on a daily basis.

While many leadership experts will tell you that empathy is critical to great leadership, it’s actually compassion — an “ objective form of empathy” — that’s key to being more in touch with your team.

Practicing compassion comes down to training yourself to see situations from another person’s perspective. Compassionate management involves taking the time to consider and understand people’s stresses so you can be better equipped to take action. Unlike empathy and empathetic leadership, compassion creates emotional distance, giving leaders the ability to proactively assist another person. Being a compassionate leader can decrease team members’ stress levels and in turn, increase their productivity and effectiveness.

Compassionate management involves taking the time to consider and understand people’s stresses so you can be better equipped to take action. It also helps your team manage their stress when they know they know you both see and hear them.
Compassionate leadership means showing genuine interest in team members’ success and well-being and a commitment to understanding, but not necessarily agreeing. As you practice this skill, you’ll find that you’ll be able to develop more loyalty and trust with team members. While raises and promotions are valuable, research has shown that it’s the positive relationships we develop at work that have a greater impact on retention.

Practice this:
• Start meetings with your team by checking in with their emotional well-being: Are they stressed? Feeling overworked? Distracted by something going on at home?

• Take a step back and check in with yourself: Are you feeling frustrated? Angry? Reflecting on your own mental state can help improve your self-awareness and emotional control.

• Foster transparency and be honest with people when things aren’t working out.

• Learn to forgive. Forgiveness has been shown to benefit health, mental fitness, and psychological safety.

Great leaders are able to quickly change course themselves and also help their team evolve with the organisation’s needs.

Adaptable people also tend to surround themselves with people of a similar mindset, establishing a culture of learning and risk-taking.

These types of leaders (much like elite athletes) tend to operate at their peak performance because they enjoy the process, continually push themselves and their teams forward, and aren’t afraid of occasionally losing. They recognise that leadership is a lifelong learning process and mistakes are optimal opportunities to better ourselves and our decision-making skills.

Practice this:

• Establish a weekly creative brainstorming meeting with yourself — push yourself toward less traditional ways of thinking.

• Find a challenging pursuit that feels meaningful but not important enough that failure cannot be tolerated. Looking failure in the eye is great practice for learning how to be brave.

• Seek new solutions to problems as opposed to leaning on the ones you typically turn to.

Studies have shown that employee development results are best achieved when a manager is actively involved in the process.

Managers who are able to take a coaching approach to leadership develop a partnership with their teammates and establish a shared vision for what needs to be done and how these goals will be accomplished. This sort of relationship will give you a more personal and active role in each individual’s development, create a relationship of trust, and foster an environment of continual growth.

Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford found that the most successful individuals tend to fall into the “improving” or “growth mindset” category. Consequently, leaders who focus on developing people can influence teammates to adopt a similar mindset of constant self-improvement.

Great leaders are able to tie people’s individual development to organisational objectives (and company core values) ultimately increasing accountability, improving employee retention, and developing stronger leaders within their teams.

Practice this:

• Instead of praising a team member’s intelligence or talent, focus on reinforcing the processes they used.

• When a team member makes a mistake, give feedback that enables them to grow and fix the problem.

• Learn how to delegate in a way that develops people.

• Take time to thoughtfully construct a developmental plan for each person on your team and review it often.

• Offer recognition for effort.

• Get to know team members as individuals in the context of work and beyond so you can coach from a Whole Person perspective.

Effective communication skills are key to building trust with your teammates and getting them to buy into your vision.

Great leaders know that listening can be more empowering than speaking. Effective communication skills are key to building trust with your teammates and getting them to buy into your vision. Effective listening is a combination of both verbal and nonverbal communication skills that can be learned and practiced over time.

In a study of over 8,000 individuals employed in a variety of industries, most respondents said that they believed that their communication skills were effective and in some cases, even more effective than those of their coworkers. Yet, research has shown that “the average person listens at only about 25% efficiency.” There’s a huge correlation between effective leadership and effective listening; effective listening “fosters cohesive bonds, commitment, and trust.”

Practice this:

• Catch the speaker’s key points and make sure you let her know you heard them.

• Strive to be more curious and remain open-minded.

• Practice allowing yourself to be fully present when speaking with teammates.

One of the joys of being a leader is the opportunity to motivate and inspire people to do their best work and pursue projects and goals that enable them to grow.

While being inspiring might sound like a soft pursuit, motivation theory has actually shown that there are proven ways leaders can motivate and inspire their teams.

Effective leaders prioritise the creation of an inspiring work environment that propels their teams to see beyond their perceived limitations and step up to new challenges.

What’s their secret?

Motivational leaders have a keen understanding of how to create a strong sense of community and belonging within their organisations, regularly celebrate and reward achievements, and set standards for performance by modelling drive, initiative-taking, and energy. As a result, their teams tend to see lower turnover, increased productivity, and increased motivation.

What are some common behaviours of leaders that teammates would call “inspiring”? They inspire others to act by creating a strong shared sense of organisational purpose, hold their teams accountable for their own destiny, prioritise growth and problem-solving skills, and tend to be humble, compassionate, and transparent — not to mention, great communicators. Leadership development experts Dr. Jack Zenger and Dr. Joseph Folkman identified 10 “companion behaviours that define an inspiring leader”:

Making the Emotional Connection
Setting Stretch Goals
Clear Vision
Communication
Developing Others
Being Collaborative
Innovative
Taking Initiative
Champion Change
Being a Role Model

Zenger and Folkman found that leaders don’t have to perfectly exemplify every leadership behaviour associated with being inspiring, but if they could strengthen just 2-3 behaviours, they could become more inspiring.

Practice this:

• Live and breathe your company mission and regularly communicate your values to your team.

• Give teammates ownership over challenging projects and set stretch goals.

• Identify the problems you want to solve, then figure out the plan for solving them.

• Some leaders are born with innate talents and a set of behaviours that make them particularly suited for greatness. But many leadership behaviours can be learned, developed, practiced over time, and used to nurture a new generation of leaders that are yet to rise to the challenge.