The qualities employers reward when they pick managers are mostly observable behaviors: self-awareness, communication, integrity, learning agility and the willingness to act on what people tell them. They are not the confident, charismatic traits that often decide who gets noticed in the first place. That mismatch matters, because it means the traits that get you selected and the traits that make you effective are not the same list.
The evidence behind this comes from leadership research rather than hiring folklore. The Center for Creative Leadership, which has studied managers at thousands of organizations, publishes a list of twelve core traits that starts with self-awareness and ends with resilience. Meanwhile, researchers estimate that leadership is about one-third born and two-thirds made, according to Psychology Today's summary of the field. In other words, most of what promotion committees reward can be learned — and most of what stalls people is fixable behavior, not personality.
This guide walks through the traits that show up repeatedly in the research, separates them from the selection biases that surround them, and gives you a way to audit yourself against the list. It is written for readers deciding where to invest effort before the next promotion cycle, not for readers looking for a pep talk. For a broader view of the coverage, the site's leadership section collects the research-based pieces.
What traits do the researchers actually name?
The most widely cited list comes from the Center for Creative Leadership. According to CCL, the twelve characteristics of a good leader are self-awareness, respect, compassion, vision, communication, learning agility, collaboration, influence, integrity, courage, gratitude and resilience. These come from decades of work with leaders across many organizations, not from a single survey.
Read the list closely and a pattern appears. Most of the traits are relational. Respect, compassion, collaboration and influence all describe how you treat other people and how you move work through them. Only a few — vision, learning agility, resilience — describe how you think on your own.
CCL also draws a distinction that is easy to miss. Compassion, the organization's researchers found, is not the same as empathy. Empathy is listening and understanding. Compassion requires the leader to then take meaningful action on what they heard. A team member who raises a concern and sees nothing change does not feel heard, no matter how well you listened.
Which traits get people selected — and which make them good?
Here is the uncomfortable finding. The traits that help someone get picked for a leadership role are not always the traits of effective leaders. Psychology Today's overview notes that selection may favor qualities like confidence, aggression and charisma, while the traits of effective leaders look more like emotional intelligence, humility, integrity and coachability. The two lists overlap far less than most promotion processes assume.
This has a direct consequence for readers who feel overlooked. If you are being measured on presence and you are investing in substance, the gap is real — but it is a gap in the measurement, not in you. The site has covered how that tightrope plays out in why executive presence is a tighter tightrope for women, and the pattern holds across the research: the same behavior reads differently depending on who displays it.
Our analysis of the combined evidence is this: treat the selection traits and the effectiveness traits as two separate games. You may need to manage the first to get in the room. You build your career on the second.
Why does integrity fail so often at the top?
Integrity appears on every serious list, and it is also where leaders fall. Nearly 40 percent of CEO resignations are prompted by failures in integrity, such as fraud and corruption, per Psychology Today. The same overview notes that reaching a position of power tends to make people overconfident, and that in many organizations few employees feel safe challenging the leader's decisions.
The numbers on voice are stark. Surveys find that as few as 1 percent of employees feel confident about airing their concerns. Organizations that welcome what researchers call employee voice — constructive but challenging upward communication — see fewer errors and better retention. One practical habit the research suggests is simple: speak last at meetings, not first.
What this means for anyone aiming upward is that the integrity trait is not about being honest in a vacuum. It is about building the kind of team that will tell you when you are wrong, before the overconfidence sets in.
How do you build the traits that can be learned?
Since leadership is estimated to be two-thirds made, the practical question is where to spend the effort. A reasonable audit, drawn from the CCL list and the research above, looks like this:
- Test your self-awareness. CCL frames self-awareness as knowing how others view you, not just how you view yourself. Ask a trusted colleague how you show up in meetings, and compare the answer to your own picture.
- Close the loop on what you hear. If someone raised a concern with you this month, check whether something visible happened as a result. If not, that is the compassion gap CCL describes.
- Practice influence transparently. CCL distinguishes influence from manipulation and ties it to trust. Persuade with reasons in the open, not with pressure in private.
- Seek criticism on purpose. Management experts cited by Psychology Today recommend actively soliciting critical comments and weighing them without bias — the direct antidote to leader overconfidence.
- Work across boundaries. Collaboration, in CCL's definition, means working effectively with colleagues of different roles, locations and experiences. Volunteer for the cross-functional project nobody wants.
None of these steps requires a title. Psychology Today notes that leadership does not depend on rank — people at any level can shape a team's climate by asking questions, offering support and fostering an open environment. The site's piece on leading without the title covers that path in detail.
What does this mean for women aiming at management roles?
The research cuts both ways. Psychology Today reports that analyses of the qualities regarded as essential for effective leadership show no inherent superiority among men, yet far more men reach the top. The traits that get people selected — confidence, aggression, charisma — are more often read as male, while the traits that predict effectiveness are not.
For women, the practical takeaway is to anchor your case for promotion in the effectiveness list. Document the feedback loops you closed, the collaboration across functions, the decisions you made on incomplete information. Those are the traits the research ties to results, and they are harder to dismiss than a style assessment. Where the structural barriers are the story, the site's coverage of how the first promotion to manager decides who reaches CEO is the relevant read. Readers following this should also see The first promotion to manager, not the ceiling, decides who reaches CEO.
One caution belongs here. Nothing in this evidence promises that demonstrating these traits will get you promoted. The research associates them with effectiveness and, in some cases, with organizational outcomes like retention and fewer errors. Promotion decisions add politics, sponsorship and timing that no trait list captures.
The takeaway
The leadership qualities employers say they want are documented and consistent: self-awareness, respect, compassion that acts, vision, communication, learning agility, collaboration, influence, integrity, courage, gratitude and resilience, per CCL. The qualities that often decide who gets the chance are different and less defensible — confidence and charisma, per the research summarized by Psychology Today. Knowing which list you are being scored on, and which one you are building, is the most useful thing this evidence offers.
