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Top of Their Game

Whether on Wall Street or not, real leaders share the same character traits.

by Maria Bartiromo

Over the years, I have interviewed the top newsmakers at the peak of their good times and in the thick of their toughest battles. I've seen who survived, who thrived, who crashed -- and why. So what makes a great leader? It comes down to a few basic character traits, whether you're in the corner office, at home with family or working in the community. Here are four of those traits:

Vision

Great ideas can emerge from the most ordinary events if a person has the vision to understand their deeper meaning. When Fred Smith was a student at Yale University, he worked as a charter pilot flying out of the New Haven airport, which served many high-tech companies. He often heard the corporate pilots kibitzing about constant flights to provide computer parts.

Smith made a simple but profound observation: "The world was going to automate, and the automated world was going to require a different type of logistics system that allowed you to supply the entire country on a nondiscriminatory basis."   Smith wrote it up as a term paper for an economics class; his professor was not impressed. After a stint in Vietnam, Smith returned to civilian life. But he never forgot his big idea. And in 1971 Federal Express was born.

Courage

Two years have passed since Hank Greenberg was forced out as chairman and chief executive of AIG because of an accounting scandal. Although no criminal charges were brought against him, Greenberg is often unfairly lumped together with fraudsters from Enron and Tyco.

Still, few will forget that Greenberg took AIG, a bit player insurance firm, and made it a $100 billion behemoth. At almost 82, he is crisscrossing the globe, applying his golden touch to C. V. Starr & Co., a $2 billion global investment firm.

Some might question whether Greenberg wants to rebuild his reputation or exact revenge on the company that kicked him out. But no one doubts that it takes courage to pick yourself up after a knock-down blow and start again.

Integrity

During this year's Valentine's Day ice storm and the Presidents' Day weekend that followed, JetBlue Airways made a series of bad decisions that left thousands of passengers stranded, many trapped on the tarmac for up to ten hours. Some chief executives might have resorted to that threadbare excuse of "circumstances beyond our control."

But not David Neeleman. He stood up and publicly apologized on the radio, on David Letterman and the Today show, in full-page newspaper ads and on jetblue.com. "We are sorry and embarrassed," Neeleman said.  "You deserved better -- a lot better -- from us, and we let you down."

His prompt action, his sincerity, and his promise to immediately remedy mistakes will go a long way toward building lasting loyalty.

Perseverance

Chris Gardner's life had all the ingredients of a hard-luck story: absent father, abusive stepfather, time spent in jail. But Gardner never stopped striving to make something more of his life, even when he and his son were living on the streets. Today he owns his own stock brokerage firm. His bestselling book, The Pursuit of Happyness, was made into a movie that was nominated for an Academy Award. Gardner had plenty of opportunities to give up, he says, but "I chose not to become what was in my face. I chose to go the other way."

Source: Reader's Digest