In reality, you don’t need tricks and strategies to be a good leader. Neither do you need leadership workshops. What you do need is to have a certain type of personality. If you are in possession of the three following qualities, you will make a good leader:
- You need to be interested in people and genuinely like them.
- At the same time, you need to not care whether they like you back. High tolerance for conflict and disagreement is a must. Ideally, you would have the kind of personality where you’re not even capable of noticing that somebody dislikes you.
- Another crucial quality for a leader is forgetfulness. You should be incapable of bearing grudges. If you’re the kind of a person who dwells on who said what to whom last month, being in charge of a group of people is going to be very painful.
I’m not a great leader because I don’t have the first of the qualities on this list. I am an okay leader because I have the second and the third. I know people who have all three. My Associate Dean is the epitome of this type of personality, and my admiration for him is deep and sincere. I always admire people who have virtues of which I am not in possession.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is an excellent list, and it occurs to me that this would describe perfectly a good leader in many situations, like a university. I make that qualification because your posts on leadership and management made me think of my best boss whom I had for most of my engineering career, a harsh, unpleasant, demanding man who nevertheless drove me to constant improvement and always led our team to business success. It was like being an athlete under a mean coach, but your team always wins. Interesting, he survived a bout with cancer and afterwards transformed into the sweetest guy with a beatific expression on his face. I guess he must have met God in the hospital or something. It’s nice, but I’m also glad that I was under his discipline when he was mean. It made me much better at my profession than I might otherwise have been.
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