Brief

How Leaders Inspire: Cracking the Code

Inspirational leadership starts with a unique combination of high-impact strengths.

By Pete Gerend, Gregory LeStage, Rob Goodenough, and Vanessa William

min read

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At a Glance

Inspirational leadership flows from a handful of authentic strengths statistically shown to contribute to inspiration.
Leveraging just one strength nearly doubles a leader’s odds of inspiring; leveraging four inspires 90% of colleagues.
Any mix of genuine strengths works, and developing a strength is 1.5 times more powerful than fixing a weakness.

Most people are wrong about inspirational leadership. Becoming an inspiring leader isn’t about charisma. It’s not about title or résumé. What makes a leader inspirational is their understanding and intentional use of their own authentic strengths that genuinely move others. To paraphrase a leader of several large organizations: There are things you can do and things only you can do.

Bain & Company has studied this topic deeply, and the good news is that inspirational leadership can be developed. In fact, it may be one of the most trainable, highest-impact leadership capabilities. It’s not one-size-fits-all. Many different strengths—and combinations of strengths—can make a leader inspirational.

So, what is an inspirational leader? Someone whose words and actions catalyze purpose, energy, and commitment in others. Someone who inspires employees to feel deeply motivated and emotionally connected to their work, their team, and their organization. Inspiration goes beyond simply engaging others in work. It provides them with meaning, fuels their work ethic, and makes them feel proud to contribute.

What makes a leader inspiring?

Too often, leadership development focuses on closing gaps and fixing weaknesses. But being an inspiring leader doesn’t require being great at everything. Many try because it feels right intuitively. And when they hold themselves up against a conventional leadership competency model, they can feel the pressure to check a lot of boxes. This is where inspirational leadership is different. Our research shows that the most inspiring leaders excel at a small set of personal strengths. These strengths feel intrinsic—natural—to the leader and give them, and the people they work with, energy.

Through our research—see the Methodology section for details—we identified 32 distinct and tangible attributes that are statistically signiﬁcant in creating inspiration in others (see Figure 1). Other attributes may also inspire, but these are the most powerful contributors to inspiration, and we’ve found that they have held up over time. The point and the power are not in this seemingly large set of “ways of being.” They are in each person’s unique subset of strengths—and in how that leader identifies and deliberately develops and applies them. This is where both the work and the impact lie.

visualization — Leaders inspire by cultivating and deploying distinguishing strengths

Why does it matter so much? First, our research finds that inspired employees are more than twice as productive as satisfied or engaged employees. Second, in the years since we made our initial findings on inspirational leadership, our experience has only reinforced their relevance. Ongoing wars, economic uncertainty, the seismic effects of the Covid pandemic, accelerating climate change, and the rise of AI: none have altered the tenets of inspirational leadership. This, in and of itself, is data about the staying power of this kind of leadership. Indeed, as AI reshapes work, leaders’ abilities to forge human connections are becoming more important than ever. While AI can do many things efficiently, effectively, and consistently, one thing it can’t do is inspire. To inspire is human.

It’s hard to overstate the collective effectiveness of an organization whose leaders inspire people at every level of the company. These are the companies that consistently pull off individual and collaborative feats, because so many of the people who work there are motivated to make them happen.

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How does a leader inspire?

Even one distinguishing strength nearly doubles a leader’s chances of being inspiring—and those demonstrating distinguishing strengths on 4 or more of the 32 elements are inspirational to 90% of their colleagues (see Figure 2).

Underscoring the power of authenticity, no combination of strengths is statistically more powerful than any other. Inspirational leaders come in many varieties. They do not try to mimic someone else’s leadership style. They find what’s already strong in themselves and build from there by using their strengths in different ways.

Focusing on his own unique strengths helped the CEO of a global sports, media, and entertainment company earn his way to the top job. His natural vitality and regular recognition of others’ contributions energized the teams he led. His ability to create an exciting vision and set clear direction are hallmarks of his inspirational style. His optimism, the wellspring of his authenticity, has helped him lead through the unexpected.

If company culture is, to paraphrase, “a shared understanding of what gets rewarded around here,” then his company’s culture is typified by a can-do attitude, collaboration, and fun. Employees at all levels say their CEO embodies this culture. He speaks in the inclusive language of “we” rather than “me” and takes the opportunity at his regular meetings with multiple levels of leaders to express his optimism about the present and future, as well as to listen to—and encourage—others’ viewpoints and foster cross-asset collaboration. Measuring by the number of team championships (the company’s most-watched output) and the ability to continuously attract and develop talent (its critical input), this culture delivers performance, and performance reinforces the culture.

However revered, whether hero or autocrat, leaders can be perceived by those below the pedestal as possessing talents that are unachievable by others. Awe-inspiring is not always motivating. Unicorns don’t work in herds. By contrast, inspirational leadership fuels a virtuous cycle. Effective top teams demonstrate collective behaviors and radiate a culture of teaming. Similarly, those who feel inspired by a leader inspire others in turn.

Inspirational leaders are centered, a state of being composed of their specific set of strengths. They focus and are present in good times and bad. They are consistent and available. They listen, demonstrate calm, and communicate clearly. When people feel secure following someone centered, they develop confidence in themselves. Observing a composed leader helps others be resilient. Those who are listened to deeply and responded to thoughtfully feel empowered to take ownership and safe in taking risks. They are motivated, not wowed, by the role model. Again, a virtuous cycle.

How to become an inspirational leader: three practical steps

Our data-driven approach reveals a hopeful truth: Inspirational leadership is more about intentional development than innate charisma. Know your strengths, practice them, and then be them, evaluating your progress by seeking feedback on how you are perceived as a leader.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Discover your strengths. Structured reflection and self-assessment are important, but calibrating your strengths also requires feedback from above, below, and across the organization. Use 360-degree feedback to identify the top four to five unique behaviors that others find motivating. Comparing that input to peers’ inspiring attributes provides a sense of relative strength.

2. Focus on developing them. Don’t try to be great at everything. Identify specific behaviors that align with your values and strengths and make them your own. For example, emotional expression, vitality, and independence manifest differently from one person to the next. Once you know what they look like for you, you will be able to feel it when you are demonstrating them.

On average, investing in adding a distinguishing strength is 1.5 times more powerful in building inspiration than neutralizing a weakness.

3. Practice daily. Understanding where you stand out from the pack based on distinguishing strengths helps you deﬁne your leadership brand, develop it, and use it more effectively in daily interactions. This includes reflecting on the impact of using your strengths. Positive reinforcement powers daily practice, and that repetition ultimately translates to behavior change.

Today, work is increasingly collaborative and self-directed. In this model, inspirational leadership can be the difference between team outperformance and mediocrity. Companies that systematically build inspiration by honoring the complexity of humans and their relationships turn leadership into a culture-wide strength. And it all begins with helping individuals discover the strengths that make them extraordinary.

The authors would like to acknowledge Mark Horwitch and Meredith Whipple for pioneering Bain’s research into inspirational leadership.

Methodology (click to expand)
When Bain first kicked off this research in 2013, three key questions guided the work:
- What characteristics matter when it comes to inspiring others?
- How many inspiring behaviors does someone need to demonstrate reliably to inspire others, and what pattern of behaviors is most powerful?
- How can we calibrate the strength of those characteristics in an individual?
To understand what inspires people, we surveyed employees at all levels, not just formal leaders or HR experts, first inside Bain and then externally. Starting with an initial survey of 2,000 Bain employees, we asked respondents to rate how inspired they were by their colleagues. We also asked them to rate contributors to that sense of inspiration. We built a list of attributes to test by studying data gathered from several disciplines—including psychology, neurology, sociology, organizational behavior, and management science—and augmented that with extensive interviews.

Using followers’ responses, we conducted a conjoint analysis (typical in consumer research) to assess the relevance of a range of attributes contributing to respondents’ feelings of inspiration. The result was a set of 32 characteristics that are statistically signiﬁcant in inspiring others. In the years since, we’ve found remarkable consistency both in these strengths and in the benefits of their development.

To determine how many of these inspiring behaviors someone needs to reliably inspire others, we used our database of more than 10,000 assessments of leaders inside and outside Bain to correlate the proﬁle of strengths and weaknesses with the level of inspiration reported by an individual’s colleagues.

We deﬁned an individual’s distinguishing strengths as those that rank within the top 10% of one’s peer group. We labeled the characteristics ranked between the 70th and 90th percentiles as potential distinguishing strengths and those in the bottom 10% as weaknesses. The characteristics falling between the 10th and 70th percentiles are neutral characteristics, because one’s level of skill neither detracts from nor contributes to the differential effect on others.

Applying those categories to real-life leaders, we found that having just four of those distinguishing strengths is sufﬁcient to make someone highly inspiring. And that any combination of distinguishing strengths works: There is no ﬁxed archetype of an inspirational leader.