5 strong leadership qualities worth striving for

Leadership looks different for everyone. What it looks like for you may depend on your seniority level. As an individual contributor, you may be focused on the path to a leadership position, trying to exhibit high employee engagement and demonstrate your ability to take on more responsibility. At the management level, you’re likely considering your team’s success as well as your own continued growth. As a C-suite executive with company-wide influence, your leadership priorities might include driving a high-performance organization and shaping cultural values.

Regardless of your current level, we’ve identified five qualities to help you develop that leadership muscle. To help you understand these qualities, we’ll explore them from the perspectives of Patagonia’s Vincent Stanley and the Financial Times’ Isabel Berwick, as shared with us on Culture First, the Culture Amp podcast on all things people & culture. Vincent is one of Patagonia’s first employees, the company’s Director of Philosophy, and an accomplished author and educator. Isabel is the Working Careers Editor at the Financial Times and the host of Working It, their workplace-focused podcast.

Their expert insights reveal what it means to embody these qualities and how they can help you become a more effective leader.

1. Cultural Alignment

When a company recognizes that employee engagement and performance are key drivers of success, we consider it a Culture First company. Building a culture centered around employee experience is a winning business strategy, but it requires cultural alignment – bringing together individual and organizational values to create a shared purpose across teams.

Cultural alignment gives work meaning and direction and makes it easier to set relevant goals that help drive employee engagement and performance.

Finding this alignment can be challenging for multi-generational teams. Different generations have different cultural standards, and these varied perspectives affect how they perceive leadership and what success looks like to them. However, there are also crossover areas as each generation transitions into the next.

Isabel advises leaders promoting cultural alignment to leverage these generational overlaps. For instance, Millennials and Baby Boomers both began working when the cultural standard was hustling to succeed, no matter the personal cost. On the other hand, Gen X and Gen Z entered the workforce when emerging technology was changing how we work. For Gen X, it was the internet; for Gen Z, it’s AI. These generations don’t have the same relationship to intense work that Millennials and Boomers do.

She encourages creative leaders to build cultural alignment by pairing mentors and mentees according to these “cultural parallels.” The baseline of shared values and work styles gives these pairs a foundation of understanding that can help mentees feel heard, and mentors feel equipped to provide insightful guidance.

While Isabel highlights what cultural alignment can look like on the individual level, Vincent shares how it plays out on an organizational level. At a mature Culture First organization like Patagonia, it evolves into a synergy known as cultural confidence. Simply put, cultural confidence is cultural alignment at the organizational scale.

Cultural confidence emerges when the overarching values of a company are reinforced by the values employees bring with them. The cycle continues as employees enter and exit the company and as business goals change. Instead of fostering cultural alignment from the top down around the organization’s shared purpose, the employees’ values and goals inform the business and vice versa.

It’s something Vincent says Patagonia has been nurturing since its founding over 50 years ago. He even credits this merging of employee and company values with keeping the company “culturally alive.” Cultural confidence has also helped position Patagonia as a paragon of how companies can hold true to their values while centering employee experience and thriving financially.

As a leader, actively fostering cultural alignment can give your team members a “North Star” to look to while ensuring that your business decisions and goals are rooted in the same core values.

2. Curiosity

Curiosity catalyzes leaders to explore new possibilities and drive innovation. Leaders who embrace curiosity are more likely to challenge the status quo, explore new possibilities, and inspire their teams to think beyond conventional boundaries.

For leaders, this ambition that Isabel describes drives not only their own development but also the evolution of their teams and organizations. Curious leaders are unafraid to ask tough questions, investigate opportunities, and explore ways to align their actions with their values. In short, curiosity is a pathway to improvement.

Take Patagonia’s decision to switch to organic cotton. While the move posed significant operational challenges, it stemmed from a relentless curiosity about how the company could live up to its environmental values.

As Vincent recalls, it wasn’t about taking the easy path; it was about making choices that better aligned with the company’s values and helped them produce higher-quality products. They bussed stakeholders to a cotton farm to see the difference in quality firsthand, and on the trip home, the feeling was unanimous: “This is a pain, but the company is doing the right thing, and we’re going to help make it happen.” Getting stakeholders curious about the reasons behind the decision helped Patagonia’s leaders adapt to a major organizational change.

Curiosity can also equip leaders to navigate the dynamic landscape of work itself.

As emerging technologies like AI transform industries, Isabel notes that curious leaders are often the first to adopt new tools and processes. And curiosity keeps people moving in their careers, leading to advancement up the company ladder. She emphasizes that embracing change can future-proof careers and organizations alike.

By cultivating curiosity, you can stay at the forefront of workplace innovation and help guide your team to long-term success.

3. Responsibility

Responsibility can take many forms, but for successful leaders, it means aligning their actions with both personal values and the organizational mission. It’s about making deliberate, sometimes difficult, choices and standing by them.

At Patagonia, responsibility is a guiding principle and a core value. As Vincent explains, the company describes itself as responsible rather than sustainable. The difference? To him, sustainability means that actions are regenerative – that what’s being taken or consumed is less than what is given back. This is a difficult feat for companies to achieve, but every company can be responsible. Responsibility reflects an ongoing commitment to tracking business impacts and continually realigning the company’s actions with its core values. It’s not about perfection – it’s about progress.

This ethos is the basis of Patagonia’s well-known commitment to environmentalism. It’s also the basis of The Responsible Company, a book Vincent co-authored with Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard. The book gives other organizations a framework for aligning business operations with values.

On the individual level, Isabel offers a complementary perspective. She highlights the importance of taking responsibility for your own employee experience at work by focusing on what you can control. Reflecting on the pandemic, Isabel mentions how we all had to get more comfortable with uncertainty.

Adapting to ever-changing work realities is a responsibility that leaders at all levels must take on in order to nurture resilience in themselves and their teams.

When a leader takes responsibility for their actions and can back those actions up against their organization's values, it inspires others to do the same. On a large enough scale, it can help a company own its right to responsibility, just like Patagonia.

Isabel and Vincent’s dual perspectives reinforce the importance of embedding responsibility as a core value. When you, as a leader, model responsibility, you build trust, create clarity, and make it easier for others in your organization to do the right thing.

4. Communication

Successfully bridging values and action is a tell-tale sign of strong leadership. In practice, leaders can achieve this goal through thoughtful and transparent communication, which in turn helps inspire confidence, clarify employee expectations, and reinforce alignment with organizational goals.

When it comes to communication, striking the right balance is key. Isabel explains that while transparency helps build trust between leaders and their teams, over-communicating may have the opposite effect. Sharing every detail can overwhelm employees and shake their confidence. Instead, by only providing highly relevant and important information, leaders can foster a sense of belonging – and stability.

At Patagonia, a standout channel of effective communication is feedback. The company prioritizes a bottom-up approach, ensuring that employees on the ground actively influence decision-making. This inclusive strategy reflects the principle of subsidiarity, which Vincent describes as one of Patagonia’s guiding philosophies: “You push decisions down to the lowest possible level, and everybody who's going to be affected by a decision is consulted.”

By empowering employees to contribute to decisions that impact their work, Patagonia fosters a culture of collaboration and shared ownership.

This approach helps leaders identify and address potential challenges early while driving employee engagement and investment in their own futures and the company’s success.

When you communicate with others, remember that what you say matters as much as how you listen, act, and align your team around a shared vision.

5. Advocacy

Advocacy – whether in support of your career or your organization’s guiding values – brings together the essential qualities of leadership. Advocacy transforms leaders into change agents, combining curiosity, responsibility, communication, and cultural alignment into visible action.

In the workplace, advocacy often begins with self-advocacy. Isabel calls out the importance of visibility, describing it as a skill that can be honed over time. For managers, this means advocating for themselves and their teams, which requires a thoughtful and practiced balance.

Advocacy is a skill that separates leaders from the rest of the pack. Especially in the age of remote work, being able to demonstrate your value is essential to career development. By advocating for themselves and others, leaders not only support their own performance goals but also help their direct reports achieve success.

At the organizational level, advocacy shines when companies align their specific values with related, meaningful action. Patagonia is a prime example.

“When companies take a stance, it [should be] in relation to what they do,” emphasizes Vincent Stanley.

For Patagonia, advocacy means supporting environmental causes, a natural extension of its mission to “build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”

The company actively supports employees’ eco-activism, even bailing them out of jail when they are arrested for acts of civil disobedience (but only if they’ve completed company-led training in non-violent practices). They’re putting their money (and legal services) where their mouth is.

This commitment builds trust and authenticity with consumers and employees alike. Patagonia focuses on causes directly tied to its business and core values, ensuring its advocacy is genuine and impactful.

Advocacy can be effective on multiple levels. Use it at your company to position yourself as a leader who stands for something and to forge bonds with peers, managers, and organizational leadership.

Cultivating Leadership Excellence with Culture Amp

Leadership isn’t one-size-fits-all – it’s about cultivating the skills and leadership qualities that drive impact and provide a strong foundation for success. These traits empower leaders to inspire trust, champion innovation, and build thriving, inclusive cultures that support employees at all levels. Whether it’s connecting values with action, accelerating team growth, or anywhere in between, effective leadership shapes organizations – and the people within them – in meaningful ways.

Culture Amp’s employee experience platform is designed to help organizations develop and enhance these essential leadership qualities. By providing tools for engagement, performance, and development, Culture Amp enables organizations to build high-performing, mission-driven teams equipped to meet today’s challenges and shape tomorrow’s opportunities.

If you’re ready to get started, explore the platform with a free product tour. If you want to dig deeper into these conversations, listen to the full episodes on purpose-driven work with Vincent Stanley and professional growth in uncertain times with Isabel Berwick.

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