13 Human Qualities You Must Have to Succeed in Work and Life

Qualities of Effective Team Members

Qualities that make you more effective when working with other people or on teams include being a good listener, being persuasive, being responsible, and being a leader.

6. Be a Good Listener

listening—“[Taking] notice of and [acting] on what someone says; [responding] to advice or a request.”—Oxford Dictionaries

Listening well is the key to effective communication. Focusing on both what people say and how they say it ensures that you accurately receive the messages people communicate to you. Paying attention to their use of language, tone of voice, body language, gestures, and emotional affect increases the probability that you will be able to correctly interpret their meaning and understand what you hear. Listen for people’s ideas, not just to their words. When you listen well, you’ll experience fewer misunderstandings and make fewer mistakes.

Effective listening is especially important when doing user research. Having empathy, being a good listener, and using your intuition will together make you a superior researcher. Everyone opens up when someone listens to them attentively and shows avid interest in what they’re saying. When you really connect with research participants, you’ll learn more from them and understand what they’re saying better. Once you’ve listened well, following up with good questions demonstrates both that you’ve really heard someone and your interest in what they’ve said.

All too often, people are so eager to speak themselves that they don’t really listen to what others are saying. When people end up talking all at once, you can’t hear what anyone is saying. So being a good listener will set you above your peers who don’t listen well.

When you’re collaborating with a product team, you never know who will contribute the best ideas. So you must draw out all of your teammates and pay careful attention to what everyone says, listening with a laser-like focus to be sure that you take in everyone’s inputs.

“If we were supposed to talk more than we listen, we would have two tongues and one ear.”—Mark Twain

7. Be Persuasive

persuasive—“Good at persuading someone to do or believe something through reasoning or the use of temptation.”—Oxford Dictionaries

As a UX professional, you must persuade others to embrace your ideas and follow your plans to get anything done. You have to persuade stakeholders to adopt your strategies and fund your projects, sell your design ideas to your design team and product team, and get developers to faithfully execute your designs and, thus, bring all of your hard work to fruition.

Your confidence in yourself and your ideas will help you to persuade others, as will your ability to make your case logically and use storytelling to provide supporting evidence. But always remain open to the ideas of others, too, and support the best ideas whatever their source. It doesn’t really matter who has the best ideas. To achieve success, what matters most is incorporating all of the best ideas into the design and, ultimately, the product.

There’s really only one way to get people to do what you want them to do, and that’s to persuade them that it’s what they want to do it. It’s a lot easier to do this when your design direction has grown out of other’s ideas, as well as your own; everyone on the team was part of the creative process; and the entire team has a sense of ownership of what you’ve created together.

“If you wish to win a man over to your ideas, first make him your friend.”—Abraham Lincoln

“If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.”—Benjamin Franklin

“To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable, we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful.”—Edward R. Morrow

“Questions are often more effective than statements in moving others. … Since the research shows that, when the facts are on your side, questions are more effective than statements, don’t you think you should be pitching more with questions?”—Daniel H. Pink

8. Be Responsible and Kind

responsible—“Capable of being trusted.”—Oxford Dictionaries

kindness—“The quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.”—Oxford Dictionaries

It’s essential that you do your best to meet your obligations to your colleagues. If you promise to do something, you should try very hard to fulfill that promise. Yes, sometimes things change—so it’s no longer desirable to move forward with something—or circumstances may prevent your doing something exactly when you said you’d do it. But in either of these cases, it’s your responsibility to discuss the problem with your colleagues and, together, determine the best way forward. There’s nothing quite as disappointing as relying on someone to do something and having them go incommunicado or disappear on you.

Don’t overcommit yourself. If you have a hard time saying no to people, you’re likely to set yourself up for failure. To prevent your disappointing people, avoid over-promising and under-delivering. If anything, you should do the opposite—that is, under-promise and overdeliver—but never deliberately under-promise in an attempt to make yourself look like a hero. That would just be dishonest. Nor should you make yourself look like a slacker by committing to doing too little work.

It’s important to be respectful of the people with whom you work. Treat your colleagues as you would like them to treat you. Being kind to one another makes the workplace a happy place to be, smooths the team’s interactions, and helps everyone to be highly productive. When your teammates are struggling, show them compassion and help them to get through tough times.

Demonstrating generosity toward the people with whom you work will set you apart from peers who are overly competitive or focused on self-advantage. Always share ideas and information freely with your teammates to enable them to do the best job they can do.

“Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason, but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.”—Jostein Gaarder

“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”—Albert Einstein

9. Be a Leader

leadership—“The action of leading a group of people or an organization.”

—Oxford Dictionaries

You don’t have to have any particular title to be a leader. Teammates typically share the responsibility for leading a team, and whoever has the necessary information and know-how to handle a particular situation takes the lead in handling it. If you have leadership qualities, you can function as a leader whenever a situation arises that requires that you take the lead, set the team’s direction, or make decisions. Those who are actually working in leadership roles must always take responsibility for leadership in their area of purview.

Great leaders set forth a vision and live up to it. They communicate their vision and goals with clarity and inspire their teams to meet them. There is always alignment between what they say and what they do. The best leaders are forward-looking, competent, intelligent, and broad-minded. Effective leaders model good human qualities for the people who work for them, including honesty, fairness, straightforwardness, dependability, cooperativeness, determination, imagination, ambition, courage, caring, maturity, loyalty, self-control, and independence. They care for the people who work for them, delegate responsibility to them, and support them in what they do. They praise publicly and, when necessary, criticize or reprimand in private.

“It’s not the absence of leadership potential that inhibits the development of more leaders; it’s the persistence of the myth that leadership can’t be learned. This haunting myth is a far more powerful deterrent to leadership development than is the nature of the person or the basics of the leadership process.”—James Kouzes and Barry Posner

"Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.”—Warren G. Bennis

“Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”—Peter F. Drucker

“The leaders who work most effectively … understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets the credit…. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”—Peter F. Drucker

“Leadership comes from integrity—that you do whatever you ask others to do.”—Scott Berkun

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

—Peter F. Drucker

Foundational Human Qualities

Qualities that form the foundation of all other human qualities include honesty, integrity, courage, self-awareness, and wholeheartedness. These qualities define who we are as human beings.

10. Be Honest and Have Integrity

honesty—“The quality of being honest,” or “free of deceit and untruthfulness; sincere.”—Oxford Dictionaries

integrity—“The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.”—Oxford Dictionaries

Being honest means telling the truth and being straightforward and open with people. A very wise man once said, “Tell the truth, but never a harsh truth.” People with personal integrity always try to do the right thing, regardless of whether anyone would ever know what they’ve done. They have a strong moral compass. It takes courage to do the right thing whatever the consequences. Integrity is a valuable quality in everyone, but it’s vital in leaders. Your honesty and integrity will engender trust in others.

“In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”—Warren Buffet

11. Be Courageous

courageous—“Not deterred by danger or pain; brave.”—Oxford Dictionaries

Having courage gives you the tenacity to work through issues and disagreements without compromising your principles. Don’t be afraid to speak out and make your opinions known—particularly if you’re the lone voice representing user experience. Master your fears and insecurities and take a stand. Live up to your values. Do the right thing. Often, you’ll derive courage from the need to stand up for others—whether users, colleagues, or the people who work for you.

You must have the courage of your convictions. For example, if you truly believe that you’ve made the right decision, don’t be dissuaded from following through on it—unless someone makes salient arguments against that course of action that truly persuade you that you should change your decision.

In their “Sleepwalking…” presentation, Dan Szuc and Jo Wong included this wonderful quotation on courage from Maya Angelou:

“Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.”

“The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”—Albert Einstein

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”—Steve Jobs

12. Be Self-Aware

self-aware—“[Having] conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.”—Oxford Dictionaries

Self-awareness—knowing what your strengths and weaknesses are and acknowledging what you have yet to learn—requires mindfulness and deep reflection on your thoughts, your emotions, your motives in your interactions with others, and what is happening in your life. It is a valuable quality that everyone should cultivate, but it’s an especially valuable quality in leaders.

When you don’t know the answer to a question or the right solution for a problem, or you’ve made a mistake, don’t be afraid to admit it. Other people are usually aware of your ignorance, weakness, or mistake anyway, so trying to hide your deficiencies just shows a lack of integrity and inevitably results in the loss of their trust and respect. In contrast, admitting your weaknesses increases your credibility and engenders trust. Plus, by acknowledging that you need help, you’ll receive the help that you need and achieve a successful outcome.

As Chris Musselwhite, CEO and Head Product Designer of Discovery Learning Inc. wrote in his article “Self-Awareness and the Effective Leader,” for Inc.com:

“When you acknowledge what you have yet to learn, you’re modeling that, in your organization, it’s okay to admit you don’t have all the answers, to make mistakes, and most importantly, to ask for help. These are all characteristics of an organization that is constantly learning and springboards to innovation and agility—two hallmarks of high-performing organizations.”

13. Be Wholehearted

wholehearted—“Showing or characterized by complete sincerity and commitment.”—Oxford Dictionaries

Being wholehearted is the quality that allows you to embrace all of the other virtuous human qualities that I’ve described in this article.

In her book Daring Greatly, Brené Brown writes about having the courage to form deep connections with other people and live a more wholehearted life. She says:

“Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. … The main concern of Wholehearted men and women is living a life defined by courage, compassion, and connection. The Wholehearted identify vulnerability as the catalyst for courage, compassion, and connection. … Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.”

Brené Brown has defined ten “guideposts for Wholehearted living…:

1. Cultivating Authenticity: Letting Go of What People Think
2. Cultivating Self-Compassion: Letting Go of Perfectionism
3. Cultivating Resilient Spirit: Letting Go of Numbing and Powerlessness
4. Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark
5. Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith: Letting Go of the Need for Certainty
6. Cultivating Creativity: Letting Go of Comparison
7. Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth
8. Cultivating Calm and Stillness: Letting Go of Anxiety as a Lifestyle
9. Cultivating Meaningful Work: Letting Go of Self-Doubt and ‘Supposed To’
10. Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance: Letting Go of Being Cool and ‘Always in Control’”

If you’ve never watched any of Brené Brown’s TED talks, check out “The Power of Vulnerability” on YouTube. It’s truly inspiring stuff!

In Conclusion

In this article, I’ve described some human qualities that all UX professionals should embrace if they want to be effective in their jobs. By manifesting these qualities in your work, you’ll ensure your success. Jo Wong is very right in saying that much of this foundation comes from our parents, but we also learn these qualities from our mentors, spiritual teachers, and, ideally, from the leaders for whom we work. That’s one reason why being a leader is such a huge responsibility.