In my experience there is a deficiency in most of the current descriptions of leadership currently available on the internet. In an article that appeared in mind tools (see article here) the author defined an effective leader as a person who does 4 things:
1: Creates an inspiring vision of the future
2: Motivates and inspires people to engage with that vision
3: Manages the delivery of that vision
4: Coaches and builds a team, so that it is more effective at achieving the vision
Now this definition of effective leadership sounds great in theory. It seems completely obvious that a person who does all of these things will be a fantastic leader. As a skeleton of what is involved in leadership it is in fact probably accurate. So why then might one think that there is something missing from this definition of effective leadership?
The substantial deficiency in this definition of effective leadership lies in its exclusive focus on behaviour and neglect of the most crucial variable when it comes to employee commitment, namely a benevolent intent. This is sadly a very common deficiency. Most definitions of effective leadership you will come across today are completely behavioural. They all reduce the problem of leadership to a problem of behaviour.
Intent:
Leadership is however a much bigger problem than mere behaviour. It is probably for this reason that the application of behavioural models of effective leadership often meet with very limited success. The behavioural formulas very often fail to translate into concrete results. This is because of the neglect of the variable that sits behind the behaviour of the leader. The variable that sits behind the behaviour of the leader is the leader’s intent. It is the stuff that sits behind his/her eyes, his reasons for acting as he does. We can come to understand the leaders intent when we come to know his true reasons for acting, the why of his actions.
Without coming to understand the issue of intent we can never come to understand effective leadership. The point is simply this, a leader can behave in all of the right ways but if his intent is fundamentally self-serving, his people will not be committed to him and will not go the extra mile for him. He will be experienced either as manipulative or as a tyrant. Any leader is only effective insofar as he has an effective team that is committed to the leader and his vision so a leader that loses the commitment of his people is not an effective leader.
If we examine all of the things above we can recognize that a leader can get all four of the things listed above right but still fail to be an effective leader because he can fail to truly get his people on his side, i.e. he fails to have the commitment of his people.We can see that behaviour is not the key variable in commitment with the help of an example:
Suppose Sally comes up to me one day and asks me for a pen. I smilingly give her the pen but two weeks I come back to Sally and tell her, “you remember I gave you a pen two weeks ago? well now I need a favor in return from you.” Now imagine a second situation in which Glenda comes up to me and asks me for a pen and I smiling give her the pen and I sincerely and honestly tell her “take the pen and don’t worry about giving me anything in return.”
The question here is, in which situation am I more likely to incur loyalty and commitment, the Sally interaction or the Glenda interaction? Clearly it is in the Glenda interaction. This is because Sally would have experienced me as a bit manipulative. She will have the experience that I only gave her the pen in order to get something out of her whereas Glenda will have had the experience that I am trying to give her something no strings attached, just because I want to be helpful to her.
The difference between the interactions is not my behaviour. In both interactions I handed over a pen. The difference between the interactions lies in my intent when giving the pen. In the Sally interaction my Intent was to gain leverage on Sally by giving her a pen and in the Glenda interaction 
my Intent was purely to give her a pen. When I return to Sally and try and use the pen as leverage I betray my true intent in the initial interaction and lose Sally’s trust and commitment.
People figure you out. In the fullness of time people will come to get an accurate appraisal of a leader’s intent. This is because the intent of the leader will show itself in situations where doing what is right conflicts with what is expedient. If in these situations the leader does what is expedient his people will catch on to that behaviour very quickly. For a leader to be effective he has to avoid this happening. How he avoids this happening is by working on his own intent. He must value what is just over his own well-being and must seek the well-being of his people over his own well-being. This is the essence of effective leadership, the effective leader looks after his people and shows them the way. He must look after them by genuinely caring for them and show them the way by never forsaking what is just for the sake of what is expedient.