In The Leadership Challenge James Kouzes and Barry Posner feature five Practices of Exemplary Leadership.

1. Modeling the way

Your title is taken for granted, but the primary way you get the respect of others is through your behavior. 

2. Inspiring a shared vision

Effective leaders are able to form pictures of what the future holds and communicate that vision to others.

Charles Pfeffer in his article “Leadership, Vision and shared-mental modeling” at the website   Winters Group: Focal Points writes:

“We have long understood the ability to describe an attractive future to be a core competency of leadership. A vision is a description of the future that is attractive because it expresses the possibility of realizing values that are important to people. A leader who can articulate such a vision creates the following of people who share a commitment to these values. 

It is useful to look at what leaders do when they articulate a vision. Fundamentally what they do is speak. This may seem obvious, but it also helps take the mystery out of leading. It is not just any old speaking that leaders do when they create vision. They speak new possibilities. They declare what they see to be possible. Think about the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” At the time, these words were not statements of fact, or even a general popular opinion. These words were an articulation of a possibility that did not yet exist, yet was extremely attractive. The more audacious the possibility, the greater the gap between the vision and the way it is today.