My Top 5

In order to be a great leader one must have a great base of traits to build from. Here are my top 5 (in no particular order):

1. Honest-your team must trust you and if you are not honest, that trust will never be gained.
2. Competent-if my leader is not competent and able to perform, or at least understand, the tasks that I do it takes a lot longer to gain my respect.
3. Risk-taking-this is more important to me if you are an employee of mine. With big risk comes big reward and I would want my supervisors to take INTELLIGENT risk.
4. Innovative-new ideas keep a team consistently growing and developing. If the leader is innovative he will inspire his team to be.
5. Rational-when a leader sets impossible deadlines he is setting his team up for failure. As a leader I want to always set my team up for success, and therefore must be rational when developing rules and regulations.

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

~Abraham Lincoln