5 Traits That Set the Best Leaders Apart

But not all leaders are created equally. So what sets the best of them apart?  

This is a question that has long intrigued Sanjay Khosla, a senior fellow and adjunct professor of marketing at the Kellogg School and an executive coach. 

In his work as a coach, he’s identified five traits shared by the leaders everyone wants to follow, the ones who inspire their teams to come up with game-changing ideas, the ones who bring their organizations to the next level. 

The traits, Khosla says, are very universal. “It’s across industries and geographies, and not necessarily just the CEOs. These are people at all different levels who share the same leadership tendencies.”

Lead with questions 

“Great leaders lead with questions,” Khosla says. This means more than simply querying team members for their thoughts. Questions need to be specific and asked with genuine curiosity. 

He tells the story of a senior manager he’s coaching who was frustrated that his team doesn’t give substantive answers when he asks for their input. They stay quiet. The manager gets annoyed, lays out a plan without the team’s thoughts, and moves on. 

By doing this again and again, the manager had trained his team to keep their thoughts to themselves, wait for his opinion, and then just agree with him. Instead, Khosla encouraged the manager to change both the types of questions he asks and the way he asks them. 

The manager now asks very specific questions—like “What are three actions we should take to dramatically scale what worked in our recent product launch?”—and often sends the questions before meetings so his team can brainstorm individually ahead of time. Then meetings can be spent improving each other’s ideas. 

But even more important is the way the manager acts during these meetings. His body language emphasizes that the questions are not a test but a sincere effort to hear his team’s opinions. And although it was very uncomfortable at first, the manager will sit in silence after he asks a question if no one is quick to answer, instead of jumping to fill the silence with his own opinions as he used to do. He also ensures that no one person dominates the discussion and everyone gets to share their thoughts. 

“Leaders need to create space for answers to emerge,” Khosla says. “I’ve found that great leadership is defined by curiosity and humility, not certainty.” 

Lead through connection 

Leaders who are highly transactional may hit their targets, but they’re unlikely to engender the trust and emotional connection that creates highly motivated and engaged teams, Khosla says. 

Instead, great leaders create authentic connections with their colleagues. This boosts engagement among teams, both in terms of how they relate to their manager and how they interact with each other. 

“You don’t want to get too personal, but you want to understand where individuals are coming from,” he explains. “And it can’t be a gimmick. You need to show you actually care.” 

This can mean creating space in one-on-ones for people to talk about whatever they think is important to know about their current work or performance. Or, if you notice that a direct report is having trouble meeting their goals, instead of coming in hot with a reprimand, ask them what help they need to succeed.  

Khosla has been coaching one of his clients on how to build these authentic connections in a professional way. By working to establish these connections, the client learned that one of her team members was having some health issues. She ended up easing up on his targets and also asked other team members to help him out for a while.  

“That was a signal for the team,” Khosla says. “She’s not all transaction; she actually cares.” 

Don’t chase shiny objects 

You may have experienced the sinking feeling of being part of a well-oiled machine where everyone is working towards a common goal when the CEO comes in on Monday and says, “‘you know, I’ve had an idea over the weekend’ or ‘I read this article and shouldn’t we consider it?’” and proposes a dramatic change of strategic course. 

When it’s a top leader saying this, “everyone kind of scurries around trying to put something behind it, and it can be a huge distraction,” Khosla says. 

The onus, then, is on the leader to be disciplined in what they mention to their team. “They have to resist the temptation to come in with these things, even as casual suggestions,” Khosla says. “There’s nothing casual about a leader telling the team, ‘I have a suggestion.’” 

That doesn’t mean leaders should ignore new information or ideas; it just means it’s a fine line between a shiny object and true inspiration. After all, disruptive companies are often the result of chasing a game-changing idea that others haven’t pursued.  

“Great leaders align teams behind a strategic direction and then get out of the way!” Khosla says. 

Learn, adapt, do 

One of the most dangerous phrases in business, Khosla says, is, “This is the way we’ve always done things.” 

“The world is changing too fast for that mindset,” he says. “Learning for the sake of learning is good, but often not good enough. You have to adapt to changing circumstances and then turn that learning into action.” 

Khosla uses the example of a senior leader he has been coaching. The company he works for invested heavily in AI training. Employees had attended workshops and learned best practices and tools. But despite all the training, the company’s success in implementing AI was limited.  

The leader challenged his team to identify specific business opportunities where AI could add value. They then created a clear plan and gave themselves 30 days to execute. This shifted the focus away from another presentation or theoretical discussion about AI and onto learning, adapting, and doing. 

They focused on a painful customer issue that had frustrated people for years: slow response times to complaints. Instead of building a massive system, they used AI to summarize complaints, identify patterns, and draft responses for frontline teams. 

Within weeks, customer response times dropped dramatically. Customers got faster answers. Teams saved time. Momentum started building. 

But what excited the leader most was not just the tangible results. It was the shift in behavior, driven by his insistence on action, experimentation, and accountability. 

“The focus is on doing rather than talking,” Khosla says. “It’s output-driven, with clear metrics and deliverables. At the end of the day, what matters most is simple: What actions did you take, and what impact did they create?” 

Share the credit 

Leaders should be confident enough in their own abilities that they’re willing to share the spotlight. “Great leaders give credit,” Khosla says. 

He recently coached an executive who had crafted a thoughtful report on a specific business operation. His boss then presented the report to senior leadership without inviting the executive to the meeting, acknowledging his contribution, or even mentioning his name.  

Sometimes it’s inevitable that the level below senior leadership isn’t invited to the big meetings, Khosla says, but the boss should have given his team member credit. The executive was understandably very frustrated.  

“He said, ‘Look, I don’t need applause, but I felt used. I feel like I’m just the PowerPoint slide maker instead of the guy who did all the thinking on this,’” Khosla says. 

Khosla often encourages leaders to handle these moments very differently. He recalls coaching an executive who was leading an important meeting after two members of her team had done all the work on a significant engineering project. She began by telling the group they had done a phenomenal job and then turned the presentation over to them. 

“I advised her not to interfere with what they’re saying. Even in the Q&A at the end, don’t interfere,” he says. That gives the two team members the spotlight and telegraphs to the rest of the group that she trusts them on this topic. 

A particular challenge in this meeting was that one very senior leader disagreed with the presenters’ conclusion. Instead of taking on his concerns directly and taking the spotlight away from the two presenters, the manager asked the whole room what they thought was the best course of action. 

That’s an excellent strategy, but if the question still isn’t resolved, a leader needs to step in and make a decision. This is what Khosla’s client did, making the call to go with the presenters’ recommendation. She said, according to Khosla: “I think this is great. Why don’t we try it out, test and learn, and then scale it if it works.” 

Khosla sees this situation as a hallmark of great leadership. The executive did not have all the answers. But by asking with curiosity, listening with humility, and sharing the spotlight, she was able to move forward decisively while empowering her team to grow. 

“The best leaders do not create followers,” he says. “They create more leaders.”