What it takes to be a great leader?

Great leaders treat their staff the way they treat their brothers and sisters and their children at home.
Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson is widely known for his leadership style. He shared some of his rules for being a great leader on a recent event in Bulgaria.

We're looking for people who want to run a company, who are genuinely good with other people. The last thing we want is somebody running a Virgin company that is rude or impolite or treadle over people to get to the top. The kind of people we want to run our companies are people who care about - the person who is cleaning the floor, care about the receptionist as much as they care about the directors in the boardroom. The phrase: "Our company is a family", is misused and abused by a lot of companies. So we want to be sure that our companies are genuinely run like you treat your brothers and your sisters or your children at your home. So we want people who run our companies to be good listeners, who listen to the people who do they work with, learning all the time bringing out the best in people. And if you can get a leader like that, then I think everything else flows from that. If you have a leader that it's not like that, then you could destroy a company very quickly. Obviously we're looking for - if we want to invest in a company, so that company to have a unique idea that it's going to make other people's life better. And in a nutshell that is what a business is - a business is simply an idea that makes people's lives better. If you don't have an idea that is going to make lives better, than you don't have a business.