Toefl Writing: What is the most important quality for both political and commercial leaders

What is the most important quality for both political and commercial leaders? Is it the creativity, the openness, or the responsibility? In fact, all of those qualities are important, but the most important quality, I believe, is responsibility. This essay is the answer.


Creativity, one of the important qualities of a leader, is the ability to think differently, to get outside of the box that constrains solutions. Creativity gives leaders the ability to see things that others have not seen and thus lead followers in new directions. While not all of those new ideas are correct, there might be some errors come from a wrong decision made by leadership. For instance, the leadership of our country once made a decision that led people to commit to produce more and more porn during the time of natural disaster, without considering about the capacity of farmers and soil. This decision resulted our country into a Great Leap Forward Time, when all of leaders in villages reported a false and large number of the crop to the central management, while, in fact, there didn’t have so much crops could be used as food in the natural disaster time. Then, there were lots of people had been starved during that time. Therefore, although a creative idea is very important, the leader should also consider about the realistic and do an appropriate policy or response to their mistake. Just as our following leaders – Deng Xiaoping made a new policy to develop our economy, which lead us could live a well life. In this sense, creativity does not as important as the responsibility.

Another vital quality of leaders -- openness means being able to listen to new ideas, even if they do not conform to the usual way of thinking. Good leaders should be able to suspend judgment while listening to others’ ideas, as well as accept new ways of doing things that someone else thought of : Openness builds mutual respect and trust between leaders and followers, and it also keeps the team well supplied with new ideas that can further its vision. Actually, the openness is another form of responsibility to their fault. Every people would make a fault whatever he is a staff or a manger. So the openness becomes more important when the manger makes an error decision and his employee proposes a correct method, the manger should adopt the employee’s proportion and do a responsibility for his fault. This suggests the importance of responsibility.

Responsibility, another vital and the most important quality of leaders, means taking personal responsibility for failures. A good leader should be magnanimous to his followers, and severe to themselves. This sort of reverse magnanimity helps other people feel good about them and draws the team closer together. To spread the fame and take the blame is a hallmark of effective leadership. So the responsibility is the most important quality of leaders.

In the nutshell, the most important quality of leaders is responsibility to their own fault.