How To Be an Inspiring Leader

Ask any group of people to name an inspiring leader and you’ll get a range of answers likely to vary from a grade school teacher or a professional sports coach to a tech company CEO. And they’re all right.

Anyone, no matter their role in other people’s lives, can learn to be inspirational. Galvanizing people to reach their potential is its own reward, and for leaders in a business setting, it can also give the organization a competitive advantage. According to Bain research, inspired employees are more than twice as productive as satisfied employees.

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How much you inspire isn’t predicated upon how extroverted or charismatic you are. Inspirational leaders must be a combination of introverted and extroverted.

To inspire, you must be self-aware enough to understand your strengths and areas that can use improvement. Then strengthen a few core skills, many of which are fundamental to being a great leader in general.

How to become an inspiring leader: Step by step

These steps will help you build skills critical for inspiring teams from a place of authenticity and passion.

Step 1: Identify your role model(s) and values

A role model is a person (real or fictitious) whose character you find worth imitating. Your role model doesn’t have to be someone famous like Oprah Winfrey or Steve Jobs. Your role model could be someone you’ve known personally who touched your life, or even a fictional character from a novel or TV show.

When choosing someone, think of the values you admire most. What characteristics and beliefs do you want to emulate in your professional and personal life? What traits do you need to show up in the world as your best self? Who represents those traits for you?

Step 2: Get acquainted with your team

Inspiration is subjective. As you get to know your team members, you’ll learn what inspires each person based on their values, personal and professional interests, and personalities. Understanding each of your team members as the whole person, not just the professional side they show at work, will help you be a more inclusive leader.

Being inclusive is both an ethical way to lead, and also develops more effective leaders. When workers feel included, they’re more willing to be inspired and work hard for you.

Read: How To Be an Inclusive Leader

Step 3: Hold yourself accountable

Inspiring leaders put the success of others before their own. So when things don’t go as planned, they own up to the part they played. Ways to hold yourself accountable include:

• Taking responsibility for your mistakes
• Admitting when you don’t know the answer
• Going back on decisions that aren’t working
• Asking team members how you could improve

You may feel uncomfortable being this vulnerable at first, but it gets easier with time and is worth the effort. Because your openness creates a psychologically safe environment for team members to make mistakes. And they see you prioritize the team over yourself, which builds trust. As you’ll see next, trust is important.

Step 4: Build trust with each team member

People can be more deeply inspired by people they can trust. But trust is hard to build and easy to break. Your team needs to see that they can rely on your word and know that you have their back. You’ll need to be diligent and consistent with your actions. Always show integrity, transparency, and respect in how you make decisions and treat people.

Dive deeper: How To Build Trust With Your Remote Teams

Step 5: Help others grow

As mentioned earlier, inspirational leaders put the success of their team members before their own. Look for ways to help others grow in their careers. Offer support before being asked; don’t wait for your team members to grow frustrated enough about an issue to bring it to their boss. Make resources available to team members and create a culture that allows them to safely take risks, so they feel inspired to challenge themselves.

Read also: How To Amplify Employee Voice

Step 6: Celebrate your team’s successes

The inspirational leadership style is selfless and appreciative. When a team member is praised, they feel proud, which may motivate them to continue to do their best. Research shows the more someone is recognized, the more engaged and excited they are about their job.

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Although there are many ways to recognize someone—an award, money, or promotion—commending someone during a weekly stand-up meeting may be enough. Note that when it comes to recognition, most employees (64%) prefer authenticity over frequency. Provide quality kudos by specifying the person, what they did, and how their work made a difference or provided value to the organization.

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Step 7: Communicate effectively

The old-school, top-down leadership approach to talking at people doesn’t create trust or a feeling of safety. Workers want a two-way conversation that helps them feel heard and that they have influence over what they do.

So when certain decisions are made, workers want to be included in the process. They want to know when a decision may be made, why it’s being made, and have an opportunity to share their opinions. People Element, an employee engagement platform, suggests amping up your communication effectiveness with these four practices:

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Step 8: Be a great storyteller

Science has proven that a well-told story can move people emotionally and intellectually. Here’s how it works:

• When people are engaged in a story, they release the neurochemical oxytocin, also called the “love hormone”
• Oxytocin makes people feel more empathetic
• The more oxytocin in the blood, the more willing people are inclined to help others

So if you use stories to tap into the collective hearts and brains of team members, they empathize with customer challenges better. Then they’re more motivated to help resolve them and have a clearer understanding of how.

To illustrate, the mission at Upwork is to create economic opportunities so that people have better lives. Saying it is one thing, but feeling it is so much more impactful, as this video of Shari Cruz demonstrates.

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7 traits that make you a more inspiring leader

When asked what makes an inspiring leader, people often cite these traits.

Humility

Inspiring leaders keep a balanced ego between confidence and humility. They remain curious, look for ways to learn and improve themselves, and are willing to admit when they make mistakes. Simon Sinek, whose teachings influence modern day leaders, said:

“If you choose to be a leader, you have to become a student. I’ve never met a great leader who thinks of themselves as an expert. All the great leaders I’ve ever met think of themselves as students.”

Watch Sinek’s TED Talk: How Great Leaders Inspire Action

Inclusiveness

No matter how you master the 8 steps of becoming an inspiring leader, people won’t be receptive to feeling inspired if they don’t feel included. Inclusive leaders treat every team member fairly and respectfully. They create a culture that helps people feel they can show up as their whole selves, are valued for their contributions, and can share their perspectives without bias.

A few of the skills required to be more inclusive can also make you more inspiring, so learning both leadership styles can make you a more effective leader overall. Get the details from the article How To Be an Inclusive Leader.

Attentiveness

One of the steps to being an inspiring leader is to be a strong communicator. And this doesn’t mean you should do all the talking. Great leaders are also skilled listeners. How can you inspire a team if you don’t know their expectations, their passions, and their challenges? How can you create an inspirational vision of your organization if you don’t know what your customers truly want?

Being an active listener is especially difficult for remote leaders, said Sarah Fern, chief people officer at Velocity Global. In a CNBC article, she said to listen for what people are not telling you. “Everyone has feedback. But how do you get to that feedback? How do you build that trust? Maybe they don't want to tell you—maybe they want to tell someone else. You have to build the relationships with your team."

Commitment

One of the most inspiring ways to lead is by example. If you’re encouraging team members to maintain a work-life balance, then log off at 5 pm, don’t send emails on the weekends, and use your vacation time.

Show you’re committed to the values, mission, and vision of the organization in the decisions you make and how you see them through with integrity. Be the voice of your team. When they have concerns, speak up on their behalf. When they have wins, share them with executive leaders and praise them to cross-functional teams.

Authenticity

Workers must feel that the boss they see at work acts the same outside of work. If they sense you’re acting “the way you’re supposed to,” instead of how you really think and feel, they won’t trust you.

Show authenticity by sharing details about yourself so team members can get to know the whole you. Be willing to talk about past challenges too, as Steve Jobs did in his Stanford University commencement speech. Jobs could have talked about all of his successes, but that would have fallen flat. Instead, he inspired graduates by talking openly about his “failures” and the pivotal lessons he learned from them.

Watch Steve Jobs’ inspirational Stanford commencement speech

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Confidence

Confidence doesn’t mean having all the answers and telling people what to do. Yes, you should have confidence in yourself and your decisions, but confidence is also demonstrated in other ways including:

• How clear your vision is and how persuasively you motivate team members to support it
• How you’re not threatened by other people’s success and help further their careers
• How you stand up for your points of view while remaining open to other perspectives

Passion

You don’t have to be passionate about every aspect of your job to be an inspiring leader. Let’s say you manufacture pallets. You may not be passionate about the actual pallet, but you may be passionate about providing customers a reliable way of moving their product, creative problem-solving, and giving direct reports opportunities to expand their careers.

What all inspirational leaders must be passionate about is their organization’s vision and mission. These declarations give work purpose. Purpose fuels passion. So if you want passionate workers, regularly express how their work contributes to the bigger picture of why the organization exists.

If you want to see how persuasive passion can be, check out this interview with Tony Buffum, VP of HR Client Strategy at Upwork. He’s so fervent about the company’s mission that his interviewers wanted to quit their jobs and work for Upwork too!

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Who are some of the most inspirational leaders of our time?

Inspirational leaders model the values, characteristics, and competencies that people admire. Here are a few of the most inspirational leaders of our time.

Oprah Winfrey

As a child, Oprah Winfrey suffered from extreme poverty and horrific abuse. She persevered, graduated college, and became one of the most influential and award-winning media personalities the world has known, a successful businessperson, and one of the richest self-made women in America.

Winfrey exemplifies her message that people should take responsibility for their lives and contribute to improving the world. Among her many contributions, she held a vital role in the drafting, lobbying, and passage of the National Child Protection Act.

Oprah Winfrey inspires people through her strength and determination in overcoming adversity, being an authentic leader, breaking gender and racial barriers, using her platform to motivate millions worldwide to improve their lives and their communities, and in her commitment to philanthropy.

Cesar Chavez

Cesar Chavez and his family became migrant farm workers during the Great Depression. This is when he experienced how the country’s poorest and most powerless workers often worked all day putting food on other people’s tables, but couldn’t afford to feed themselves.

Chavez committed his life to improving the working and living conditions of U.S. farm workers. He went on hunger strikes to protest unfair labor practices and lived in poverty to be closer to the farmworkers he was fighting for. He co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers of America) and won important victories to raise pay and improve working conditions for farm workers. He posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994, a year after his death.

The memory of Cesar Chavez continues to inspire people in his skills as a grassroots organizer, his commitment to social justice, and his dedication to non-violent activism. By laying the foundation for several labor laws and protections, he created a framework for lasting change that inspires current generations to continue improving the world.

Melinda French Gates

Melinda French Gates is co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since its inception in 2000, the foundation has donated more than $65 billion worldwide toward combating disease, improving education, furthering gender equality, and other critical issues.

Through the Gates Foundation and her other philanthropic organization, Pivotal Ventures, French Gates seeks to create a world “where every person has an equal opportunity to live a better life.”

Melinda French Gates inspires people by speaking candidly about her personal experiences regarding gender inequality, seeking to learn from people in communities that are affected by poverty and disease, and dedicating her vast wealth and influence to make lasting social improvements globally.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates dropped out of college to co-found and lead Microsoft. His ability to make strategic business decisions and take risks had grown Microsoft into a $300 billion company by the time he stepped down in 2014.

Throughout his career, Gates was guided by his vision for the future of technology and its potential to address some of the world's biggest challenges. He played a crucial role in developing the personal computer and for how technology is used today. He is also co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to which he dedicated a large portion of his vast personal wealth.

Bill Gates inspires people through his innovations in technology and business, his willingness to take risks, his generous philanthropy, and by remaining committed to his visions—even during difficult times.

Mukesh Ambani

Mukesh Ambani is a symbol of national pride for India. One article claims, “There is a greater chance that an average Indian may not know the Vice President of the country or the Chief Minister of his State but will still know who Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man is.”

Upon his father’s request, Ambani dropped out of his MBA program to help his father’s company expand. At that time, Reliance Industries Limited was an emerging enterprise. Ambani expanded Reliance to become one of the largest conglomerates globally. Its reach extends across various industries from petrochemicals to telecommunications and e-commerce.

Mukesh Ambani inspires people in his ability to anticipate market trends as well as in his philanthropy, his significant role placing India as a major player in the global economy, and in the initiatives he’s taken to make Reliance a more environmentally sustainable company.

Linda R. Gooden

Linda R. Gooden retired in 2013 from Lockeed Martin as the company’s Executive Vice President of Information Systems & Global Services (IS&GS). Under her leadership, the business generated more than $10 billion in annual sales. She established and managed the first major contractor cyber center in Maryland. And she led the development of cyber solutions for federal defense, intelligence and commercial customers.

Her many awards include induction into the prestigious Career Communications Hall of Fame,  Fortune's 50 Most Powerful Women in Business three years in a row, and presidential appointment to the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. A champion for inclusive education, Gooden serves on several boards including University of Maryland (UMD) Clark School of Engineering.

Linda R. Gooden inspires people in how she broke racial and gender barriers in the male-dominated tech field. She is admired for her strategic thinking, business leadership skills, and commitment to making quality education available for all children.

Inspiring leaders are made, not born

To be an inspirational leader, you must get out of your mind and into your heart. Your heart is where you’ll find the passion to lead with such authenticity that people are willing to follow you. And it’s where you’ll find the courage to persevere during difficult times and rally teams to push through.

Bain research shows that inspiring leaders are made, not born. Upwork can help you get started today. In our marketplace, you’ll find top independent coaches and HR professionals ready to help you become the inspirational leader you desire to be.