As the quality of the HR professional manager goes, so goes the organization. Without quality top management in place, the duties of an HR department either go without fulfillment or lack quality in their deliverables or even outright failure. A competitive advantage to any organization is the ability to procure successful managers by the identification of certain traits in those managers. The identification of these traits can be used as a reference for making decisions in respective organizations such as hiring, promotion, pay bumps, determine training efforts, and judging the output of current and prospective managers. If traits were able to be identified, categorized, and ranked via a comprehensive analysis there could be a rubric of sorts which could provide HR professionals with a set of traits to create a more successful workplace via the integration of successful managers. Traits can be identified by various mechanisms including but not limited to tests, direct and indirect observation, surveys, questionnaires and interviews.

Results produced were an indication of (taken from a survey of approximately 180 HR professional from eight Society for Human Resource Management chapters in North Texas) their perspective of which traits make up a successful manager. The top three qualities that surfaced were integrity, communications skills, and a manager who was considered to ‘lead by example.’ A fourth trait was also mentioned later in the paper regarding how a successful manager ‘empowers’ his/her employees. These were the top four qualities out of a pool of sixteen qualities. The output of a factor analysis provided four factors of great leadership traits. The four factors are honest and open contacts, high energy, creativity, and adaptability. Certain weaknesses in this paper are that the sample size is very small, as well as quite narrow in its scope of interviewees. The use of only 16 traits is fairly limited when considering the potential number of traits that could be analyzed. Future research could cover a wider swath in terms of geographical location, diversity of respondents, and the integration of more empirical literature reviews. It is worth noting that the strength of association between an elevated participative management and ideals of “understands team concept,” as well as “adapts to change” were high.