Lots of people have titles or roles that suggest they’re a leader. But it’s amazing how many executives simply behave as administrators or care takers in the job they’ve taken on. In the process, they often do more harm than good, increasing employee turnover, failing to drive performance improvements or to respond effectively to strategic changes in the marketplace. Poor leadership is immensely costly.

In delivering a keynote talk for the American Counseling Association’s Institute for Leadership Training, I identified seven key principles that should shape every leader’s behavior. Here are four related questions from my presentation that can immediately improve your effectiveness as a leader.

1. Why do you want to be a leader?

People are often promoted or recruited into leadership roles without thinking through why they want to take the job. Leadership in organizations today is getting harder by the month. There are fewer resources, more challenging goals, less time and more stakeholders are involved.

As a result, lots of so-called leaders in organizations are struggling just to execute on an existing process or plan, and they inspire nobody. If you aren’t clear on your purpose in leading in this environment, you won’t be effective or satisfied in the long run. Do you want to:

• Produce results by exciting people to achieve great things?
• Make good performance meaningful to your employees (or volunteers)?
• Continually communicate an inspiring purpose to followers?

If you can answer “yes” to these questions, then you have the right motivation to lead in today’s emotionally complex workplace.

2. Why should anyone be led by you?

This provocative question is the title of one of my favorite books on leadership by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones. Can you answer their question thoughtfully? Having a leadership position doesn’t make you a leader. To lead others you have to demonstrate you’re worth following. Here are four things employees are looking for in their leaders:

• Authenticity – Do you know yourself and reveal yourself, including some of your weaknesses? Goffee and Jones argue that skillfully exposing some of your weaknesses makes you more human and approachable.
• Significance – Do you communicate that what you’re trying to achieve is important and continually recognize people for their contributions?
• Excitement – Does your passion energize others to greater levels of effort?
• Community – Do you work to create a sense of belonging, to help people connect to each other and to a larger purpose?

Focus on providing what followers are looking for, and you’re much more likely to have people wanting to be led by you.

3. Are you willing to change yourself before asking others to change?

Being an effective leader often means motivating others to meet difficult challenges or to change their behaviors. One of the most overlooked principles of leadership is the need either to model the behaviors you’re asking of others or to make personal sacrifices that clearly communicate we’re all in this together.

Bob Quinn, author of Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within, is the most articulate advocate of this practice. Quinn has shown that to have the moral authority to lead others we have to be willing to change ourselves first. The cost of being a truly effective leader is to transform ourselves before asking others to change.

Quinn tells the story of Tom Jones, who was president of a division in insurance giant CIGNA. Jones knew that his unit had to undergo fundamental strategic and cultural change to survive, even though it was still growing at the time. Predictably, Jones ran into massive resistance from his staff until he learned it is was essential that he and his senior team model the new behaviors they expected of others. Only then could he begin to make significant progress in changing the division.

To be an effective leader in today’s workplace you must be willing to continually reflect on your own behavior and decide how you’re going to change to gain the credibility you need to influence others.

4. What’s your leadership legacy?

Often your most important task as a leader will be to identify and prepare your successor for success. This is increasingly important in organizations where so many executive roles require a complex combination of knowledge about your industry, technical systems, operational processes, customers, partners in your supply chain, and regulations – for starters. The knowledge needed in certain leadership roles can be overwhelming. That’s why you need to start asking two questions early in your tenure.

• How do I want my team, unit or organization to be different when my leadership assignment ends?

Continually asking this question will help shape your agenda and priorities. But you should also ask:

• What am I doing to identify and prepare a successor to follow me effectively?

The leadership pipeline in industrialized nations is dangerously thin with the retirement of so many Baby Boomers. And demanding leadership roles are only getting harder to fill. Of course, it depends on the job, but in many cases you’ll be doing your organization a disservice if you’re not actively thinking about and developing a successor for your role.

If you want to immediately boost your effectiveness as a leader, force yourself to continually engage with these questions. Answer them as honestly as you can, and the results will pay off. Let me know if you find them valuable, and please suggest other critical questions that can help develop effective leaders faster.