Describe a Leader You Respect

The leader I respect the most is actually the first manager I ever had, a woman called Sofia, who ran the small team I joined when I got my first proper job after university. She wasn't a famous CEO or a politician — just a team leader in a fairly ordinary company — but she taught me more about what real leadership looks like than anyone I've come across since. To this day, she's my benchmark for what a good boss should be.

She led a customer-support team of about ten of us, most of whom were young and, frankly, a bit clueless at the start, myself very much included. Her job was partly about hitting targets, but she saw it far more as developing people, and that shift in focus made all the difference to how the team ran. People rarely wanted to leave, which in that industry is almost unheard of.

The kind of leader she was, was one who very much led by example. She never asked us to do anything she wasn't willing to do herself — if the phones were going mad and we were drowning, she'd sit down and take calls right alongside us rather than hiding away in her office. She was incredibly level-headed under pressure, and she was approachable in a way that meant you were never afraid to admit you'd made a mistake. She also always gave credit where it was due, making sure the higher-ups knew exactly who'd done the good work.

The main reason I respect her, though, comes down to one particular situation. There was a time when something went badly wrong with a big client — it was genuinely a junior colleague's error — and senior management came down looking for someone to blame. Instead of throwing that colleague under the bus, which honestly would have been the easy thing to do, Sofia stood up and took full responsibility herself, as the person in charge. Then, privately, she sat down with the colleague and calmly worked through what had happened so it wouldn't happen again. She never once humiliated anyone. That combination — taking the heat publicly but coaching gently in private — earned her absolute loyalty from every one of us. We'd have run through walls for her, and I think that's the real test of a leader.

So that's Sofia. She showed me that leadership isn't about titles or barking orders — it's about having your team's back and bringing out the best in people. Whenever I've been in even a small position of responsibility since, I've caught myself asking what Sofia would have done.