When it comes to leaders, we talk about all kinds of desireable traits, characteristics and behaviors. Effective leadership involves a complex interplay of critical elements.

For example, we can't deny the importance of organizational vision, mutual purpose, or the creation and maintenance of organizational culture to effective leadership. However, leadership is much more personal than that; credibility matters and provides the foundation of personal leadership. So are you a credible leader? By credible, I mean the quality of being believable, dependable, and worthy of people's trust and confidence.

Without influence we can't exercise leadership; when we lead, we attempt to have an effect on another person's attitudes, beliefs, values or behaviors. This process of influence can't occur without relationships between people that make that influence possible. The relationships that we know with leaders are interactive, mutual and multi-directional. In other words, leaders and followers influence each other. The follower has as much influence as the leader, and leaders and followers are understood in relation to each other.

Leader and follower are situational roles more than fixed responsibilities or positions. At any given time you may find yourself in either role, regardless of your formal title in the organization. Followers, or constituents, now are central to the process of leadership and will remain so for the foreseeable future. In today's workplace, absent coercion, people choose to follow. Without willing followers, there are no leaders and there exists no potential for leadership. So what makes people choose to follow another person?

Since 1983, leadership consultants and authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner have asked more than 75,000 people throughout the world, “What do you look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction you would willingly follow?” Regardless of where people are, or the type of organization they serve, they want leaders who are honest, forward-looking, inspiring and competent — in other words, personally credible.

We know that honesty and trustworthiness are essential to leadership. People willingly follow only those people who they believe are worthy of their trust. We also know that people expect leaders to have a sense of direction for the organization, a vision for the future. We expect our leaders to inspire us, by communicating in ways that encourage us to perform to our potential.

However, it is the last area, competence, that leads me to believe that credibility provides a cornerstone of leadership. People want to follow a person who can get the job done and who demonstrates the ability to lead. In short, leaders must have knowledge, skills and abilities to perform their jobs and live up to their responsibilities. Make no mistake, people can, and do, distinguish between the behavior of individuals who are credible and those who aren't.

A credible leader is one whom followers perceive as effective. The followers' perception of the leader's effectiveness bears directly on the leader's credibility, the followers' willingness to follow and the leader's ability to lead. For people to follow on a sustained basis, they must perceive the leader as effective. However, by itself, a perception of effective leadership is not sufficient to lead.

Sometimes our view of a leadership relationship may not closely reflect the reality of the situation. For example, we know that people, when they believe in their leader, tend to link positive events with the leader's behaviors and influence. However, eventually perception must match reality. The leader has to deliver, and his or her behavior must match that image over the long-term.

Eventually, constituents ask, “What is really going on around here?” People want to know that they are actually making progress toward the leader's intent or the organization's vision. They want to know whether they are succeeding. A leader who creates and communicates a clear and compelling vision and develops commitment to that vision, but cannot lead the organization to implement or execute the vision, loses credibility.

A credible leader also is someone who acts with character and integrity. Leaders earn and strengthen credibility when they know their values and have the skills and confidence necessary to act in ways consistent with those values. A leader loses credibility when his or her actions appear inconsistent with promises. Under these circumstances, honesty comes into question and trust is broken.

Leaders gain credibility when they build the trust and confidence of their constituents. People trust their leaders only when they believe that the leader has the constituents' interests at heart. Leaders gain and maintain credibility when they demonstrate, by their actions, that they believe in and support their people. In effective modern organizations, leaders serve constituents, and together they serve a mutual purpose. To view their leader as credible, constituents need to know that the leader represents their values and needs and meets their standards.

Leaders enhance their credibility when they distribute leadership throughout the organization, empower people to act and invest in building the competence of others. Credible leaders create conditions that build and reinforce people's confidence, create a sense of effectiveness and encourage performance. A good leader enables followers to develop judgment and initiative, grow and become better contributors, succeed without strong leadership, and gain independence to become leaders themselves.

Leadership is a process of influencing relationships among people and, accordingly, leaders achieve credibility through human contact. Credible leaders interact with people, listen and communicate. By listening to constituents, leaders maintain situation awareness, receive important information, know what's going on and stay in touch with critical feedback.

I contend that credibility — that quality of being believable, dependable, and worthy of people's trust and confidence — provides the foundation of leadership. If you are interested in developing your understanding of the relationship between credibility and leadership, I recommend the book Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It by Kouzes and Posner.

Mike DeGrosky is chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting firm specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service. His interests include leadership, strategy, and bringing the concepts of learning organizations and high-reliability organizing alive in fire organizations. He is currently completing a master's degree in organizational leadership. He can be reached at info@guidancegroup.org.