Good leaders especially nowadays in the fast-moving professional business world need many different qualities. They must be visionary, set goals, understand the digital universe, be empathetic and able to manage and develop a diverse team, often spread across many locations or even countries.
 
However, one perhaps underrated characteristic that nevertheless really defines great leaders is the ability to truly create an atmosphere in which teams or whole businesses can flourish and function to the best of their ability. This can be done by many actions all of which create a sense of team spirit and a willingness to work together.  These can include being available to your colleagues, actively listening in one on ones, using empathy in team meetings, by humour and encouraging the enjoyment of work, and occasionally just by sheer force of personality. 
 
See for example this LinkedIn article A Good Leader Must Create the Right Atmosphere which suggests perhaps the first element of leadership that all managers should learn, (regardless of the industry you’re in), is how to create the right working atmosphere and goes on to say If a manager establishes mutual trust and respect with his or her employees, a foundation is paved for effective individual performance and team harmony.
 
And also this article CREATING A POSITIVE TEAM ATMOSPHERE which comments The way leaders interact with team members and the messages they send out via their behaviour, language and attitudes is perhaps the biggest single influence on team atmosphere.
 
It’s akin to building a firm’s culture – see this Forbes article The Role Leadership Has In Company Culture which starts Every employee impacts an organization's direction, but leadership has by far the largest and most direct effect on company culture, which revolves around employee engagement, environment, atmosphere and the success of the company and its clients.
 
This New York Times Business article How to Build a Successful Team cites leaders insightsthat can help you lay the groundwork for a highly productive team that can communicate, cooperate and innovate in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect. 
 
The opposite of an empathetic leader who builds a team and creates the best atmosphere to develop is a boss who rules by applying the “FUD” principles of leadership – creating an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and doubt – making each individual fear for their jobs each time you speak to them. This gets everybody in line and they certainly do what they are told – but will they go the extra mile and improve themselves and their colleagues?
 
And it is a personality thing. As J R Miller the American Christian author comments Everyone carries an atmosphere about him. It may be healthful and invigorating, or it may be unwholesome and depressing. It may make a little spot of the world a sweeter, better, safer place to live in; or it may make it harder for those to live worthily and beautifully who dwell within its circle.
 
So I propose we should look for and follow and be leaders who create an empathetic environment in which it is fun to work and where we can all succeed. I agree with Joe Wright  the English film director when he says I see the job of directing as being one of creating the right atmosphere, where people can realise their full potential.
 

Everybody’s been to a poor PowerPoint presentation where the slides are too crowded, and the speaker knows this because they repeatedly apologise for the fact – but then still try to explain ninety per cent of the words on the slides. The majority of the audience have started WhastsApping or IMing or just plain daydreaming in the first five minutes or even less. 
 
Dale Carnegie said “Dramatise your ideas”and he was absolutely right. At one presentation I was giving to a global IT legal audience in Scandinavia of two hundred or more, at a certain point I got down off the stage (a raised platform) and walked into the audience whilst continuing the talk. It’s amazing to watch as heads come up and laptops are rather guiltily closed.
 
On another occasion in Stockholm at an ITechLaw conference, where I was speaking on developing trends in outsourcing, I started the talk by playing Bob Dylan’s The times they are a changin by Bob Dylan – because he had in 2016 been awarded the Nobel prize for literature which was eventually presented to him in Stockholm.
 
In a talk in London on Tower Outsourcing I started with the theme tune and video from Game of Thrones, drawing parallels between the complexity of the drama series and outsourcing to multiple vendors. 
 
All of this gets your audience onside right at the start and once you have their attention getting your points across is much easier. I like this article Tips for Making Effective PowerPoint Presentations which suggests The key to success is to make certain your slideshow is a visual aid and not a visual distraction. And here is a Forbes article 5 Principles For Making PowerPoint Slides With Impact which has some useful ideas including “telling a story”. In a similar manner this blog  10 POWERFUL WAYS TO OPEN A PRESENTATION WITH IMPACT suggests The first 30 seconds of a presentation is crucial – so don’t waste itand discusses using humour,  telling a story or starting with a quote.  
 
There are also lessons to be learned from statesman and their speeches. Who does this extract from an historical article refer to? He wasn’t a natural orator, not at all. His voice was raspy. A stammer and a lisp often marred many of his speeches. Nor was his appearance attractive. A snub nose and a jutting lower lip made him look like a bulldog. Short and fat, he was also stoop-shouldered.
 
As it goes on to say this man—Sir Winston Churchill—became probably the greatest orator of our time and won the Nobel Prize for his writings and “brilliant oratory.”  It then discusses how he did this including his exceptional feel for and use of the English language. It also cites extracts from an unpublished article by him on oratory, The Scaffolding of Rhetoric, which recommends amongst other things the use of analogy.
 
None of this comes easily – I had been giving presentations for years before thinking of the examples I cited above. But I think that we can all improve – the marketing specialist, author and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawaski commented that no one, or very few, are born as good presenters. It's a skill that you learn. 
 
As a parting comment follow the advice of Peter Gruber (the American business executive, entrepreneur, educator and author) that Stories have a unique power to move people’s hearts, minds and wallets, and above all with aids like slides, as Leonardo da Vinci suggested “Simplicity is the greatest sophistication”.

We went to the beach in the Mediterranean on our recent holiday (now sadly just a memory) to find the sea was very rough with too many waves to snorkel and not many people in the water. However, despite this it was ideal for trying out a new bodyboard and for surfing into the beach with the large waves. Once in the sea you forget how rough the water is and are always looking for and welcoming the next big wave to ride in on.
 
It struck me at the time, that this reflects the right attitude to our complex jobs in the professional world, where we are asked to deal with repeated difficult and time critical demands. One approach which is easy to fall into is to become swamped by the repeated “waves” of challenges. The better attitude is to welcome the opportunity of each wave, the larger the better, and see how far dealing with the issue can take you in solving the problem and learning from the experience. 
 
Then suddenly instead of worrying about the “rough seas” we are looking forward to them and to conquering the challenge they bring. Instead of being concerned and defensive this attitude puts you on the front foot and somehow the problems are then easier to solve. 
 
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines rising to the challenge as to perform so as to succeed. Dealing with successive problems and issues is commonplace these days for professionals in this changing world. See this Forbes article How To Respond To Workplace Adversity With Resilience which suggests that adversity tends to spark a counter-productive responsewhen instead of dealing with a new challenge:
 
“When our brains are preoccupied, …….. we engage in counterproductive behavior. “We demonize, we retreat from the problem itself and from others who might provide counsel, and then we redouble those efforts. We do more and more of the behavior that didn’t help us in the first place.” 
 
It then proposes an “adversity toolkit” with some ideas on how to recognise and understand the crisis and develop a plan to deal with it rather than being overwhelmed.
 
In this Harvard Gazette article on How Leaders are Shaped Nancy F. Koehn a historian at Harvard Business School suggests that leaders rise by responding effectively and thoughtfully to challengescommenting that it starts with the realization of the individual that a crisis is a great classroom. This is the realization of many of us who have been through a major challenge, that there is something fertile in all this adversity, all this confusion, all this ambiguity, and at times borderline despair, in that “I can learn something important for myself of what I might be.
 
The 17th century French playwright Moliere wrote The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.
 
So as the academic and author of Mindset Carol Dweck advisesLove challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort and keep on learning.
  
And in my case as the Beachboys sang:
 
We're waxing down our surfboards
We can't wait for June
We'll all be gone for the summer
We're on surfari to stay
Tell the teacher we're surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A.