Leadership, mentorship, passion, and business acumen.
Leadership in that that person must set the standards and direction for the organizations’ offerings, be they products, services, or both. How much due diligence should be done to ensure designs align with user needs? What process should be defined and followed to do this? What level of design documentation and testing is required? And so on. He/she needs to be the person who says “this is the way to do things” and they need to be able to convince the powers that be that their way makes sense and is the right approach.
Mentorship in that the person in charge of UX needs to provide opportunities to learn and grow to all of their team members. He/she needs to provide a UX “job ladder”, with a list of all roles and what is needed to get there (so the team will have a “target” to hit) and needs to support the training and opportunities necessary to help the team members get to where they want to go.
Passion in that the UX leader needs to be passionate about making lives better by providing user-centered products and solutions to people. This passion needs to be (somewhat) tempered by pragmatic realism, so that the passion will not override or supplant business goals. Unrealistic passion often results in academic exercises that don’t produce useful results.
Finally, a UX leader needs to have business acumen. He/she needs to be able to read people and situations, understand the “politics” of a particular organization, and communicate effectively both “up” and “down”. UX leaders who fail to have business “savvy” usually end up being ineffective in getting things done and supporting their team.