Make Yourself Accountable

The hands down, best way to ensure your effectiveness in leadership is to:
1. Develop a set of ongoing leadership goals or behaviors
2. Communicate those goals to the people you lead at the beginning of an evaluation cycle
3. Take action every day to further those goals
4. Provide periodic, anonymous ways for the people you lead to rate you on those leadership goals or behaviors
5. Communicate the results of those ratings to the people you lead with a focus on receiving constructive feedback on how to improve on the goals or behaviors you were rated lowest on

I don't personally know many people who do this - it takes extreme humility.

This constitutes a real problem with leadership in the IT space. Most top leaders in IT have a boss who has no idea what they really do, so there's no real accountability there. Very, very few willingly submit to the type of process described above, so there's no real accountability there, either.

As a result, effective IT leaders are often frustrated because they get little recognition for what they do well. Ineffective IT leaders can float along in an organization just being ineffective with little consequence - that is, until someone above them suspects something isn't right, orders an outside review of the department, and suddenly that person is in big trouble.