The "Leadership" that I perceived

Recently, I made a casual invitation to my friends on the discussion of "Top 3 Leadership Attributes". My friends are really good and enthusiastic. They gave me their answers quickly.

During this little exercise, I learnt 2 things:

1. Everybody expects differently from "leadership"
2. Surprisingly, we could apply a well known requirement management technique - pairwise comparison - to more scientifically evaluate our personal priorities.

Guess I don't need to talk about (1) as it's obvious.

For (2), my way on doing pairwise comparison is like this:

For the first step, I write down all the attributes that I think important for a leader, like the following:

• Adaptive to changes
• Appropriate use of talent
• Charismatic
• Clear and efficient communication
• Decisive
• Empathetic
• Forgiving
• Honest
• Influential
• Innovative
• Open-minded
• Persistent
• Positive thinking
• Problem solving
• Self-discipline
• Visionary

Then I do a pairwise comparison using a spreadsheet (it takes me about 20 minutes) and get the following:
(Here, I compare them one on one and give a score for each pair: 2 for the winner, 0 for the loser and 1 for each attribute if they tie.)

• (Score Attribute)
  
• 28 Visionary
• 27 Influential
• 27 Persistent
• 26 Positive thinking
• 24 Decisive
• 21 Innovative
• 19 Problem solving
• 16 Clear and efficient communication
• 15 Open-minded
• 13 Appropriate use of talent
• 10 Charismatic
• 9 Adaptive to changes
• 7 Forgiving
• 7 Honest
• 6 Empathetic
• 1 Self-discipline

So my answer is:

1. Visionary
2. Influential
3. Persistent

When applying back to requirement management, imagine if you have tens of requirement items (if too many, you may need to group them first and compare the groups) and if we would like your stakeholders to prioritize, give them a task (or most of the time, you need to work with them or interview them) to do this pairwise comparison. And you have strong justifications for the priorities yielded. Most of the time, with a not-too-emotional stakeholder, you will get a comfortable compromise among related parties.

Enjoy!