10 Virtues of Outstanding Leaders

Leadership and Character

Al Gini, Ronald M. Green

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118551622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Ética empresarial

What makes a good leader? Ten leaders, ten key virtues

This readable distillation of the core common features of successful leaders shows how an individual's character, and especially their virtue, is the defining factor. Without these ten vital virtues, leadership becomes "misleadership." The authors, both renowned business ethicists, combine theory with fascinating biographical detail on exemplary leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Oprah Winfrey. The result is an accessible text on the ethics of leadership which, unlike many publications that claim to reveal the secrets of success as a leader, is informed by a wealth of exceptional academic experience.

Part I

Character Leadership

1

What Is Leadership?

Twixt kings and tyrants there’s this difference known:

kings seek their subjects’ good, tyrants their own.

Robert Herrick¹

We began by observing that leadership is a necessary requirement of life. French President and Second World War hero Charles de Gaulle once observed that human beings can no more survive without direction than they can without eating, drinking, or sleeping. Putting aside the fact that de Gaulle exemplified “the one great person theory” of leadership and that he was most probably talking about himself, his larger point is true.

Today we accord movie star status to many of our leaders. Some of them become cultural icons and cultural role models. For example, the president of the United States is, arguably, the most photographed person in the world. Barack Obama’s first inauguration was the most reported event of its time. Former President Bill Clinton is a celebrity. The media have tracked every turn in the life of business leaders like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Where once saints dominated our imagination and were looked to for guidance, political and business leaders now play that role.

Why is leadership such a fascinating topic? Why are we so enthralled by leadership and curious about the private and public lives of leaders? According to military historian John Keegan, we are intrigued, inspired, and intimidated by those who wear the “mask of command.”² We are mesmerized both by the successful exploits and by the front-page failures of individual leaders. We love them, we hate them. We shun them, and yet we seek them out. Many of us think that leadership is a magical amulet. If we can just get the right person, the right leader, in the right job, success will naturally and necessarily follow. Leadership seems crucial for personal and organization success.

But how do we define what seems to be a critical and necessary ingredient for success? Unfortunately, although many of us can recognize leaders and leadership, few can give these terms an exact definition. Even when we can describe the concepts denoted by the words we employ, we find ourselves unable to reduce that concept to a few words: we all agree that leadership is important, but we disagree in stating what it is. W. B. Gallie refers to these kinds of words as “essentially contested concepts” and argues that they are a regular part of our lives and vocabulary.³ The challenge is to go beyond points of disagreement and discover the ideas that are essential to all our understandings of the concept.

Above all, it is important to begin by noting what leadership is not. According to John Gardner, leadership should never be confused or directly equated with social status, power, position, rank, or title.

Even in large corporations and government agencies, the top-ranking person may simply be bureaucrat number one. We have all occasionally encountered top persons who couldn’t lead a squad of seven year olds to the ice cream counter.⁴

Perhaps business ethicist Price Pritchett puts it even more exactly when he says: “Putting a man in charge and calling him a leader is like giving a man a Bible and calling him a preacher. Bestowing the title doesn’t bestow the talent.”⁵ The simple fact is, an appropriate label for any person giving orders, monitoring compliance, and administering performance-based rewards and punishments could be “supervisor” or “manager,” but not necessarily “leader.”⁶

A Reflection

But if the term “leadership” does not apply to all people within organizations who exercise responsibility, nor does it mean that only the “top dog” of an organization exercises leadership. Leadership can (and should) arise at all levels of an organization when challenges must be faced and important tasks accomplished. A primary duty of all leaders is to inspire and empower each member of the organization to be a leader within his/her own area of responsibility. At the close of the Second World War, General Dwight Eisenhower put this well when he wrote in his war biography:

In the end, the success of D-Day wasn’t superior generalship or years of careful planning. Nor was it our superiority in numbers and supplies. Rather it was the initiative and leadership of countless individual GIs that won the battle for us. It was the courage of men who took charge of the situations they found themselves in and their private determination to prevail.⁷

In their influential book The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner argue that, while there are a multitude of leadership definitions, they all share a common focus or a central theme. Leadership, of every kind and at every level, is about offering others an “action guide,” a plan, a challenge, a goal, a purpose that they are willing to embrace and carry on. Leadership is about motivating and mobilizing people to get “something” done, be that extraordinary or otherwise. Leadership is a catalyst for action. Of course, whether that action is moral or immoral, good or bad, positive or negative has to be determined through normative analysis and debate. But the conclusion is the same: all forms of leadership are action-based and action-driven. Although we agree with Kouzes and Posner that leadership is essentially about deliberate and concerted effort and action, we would argue that leadership is also about the personality and character – the ethical substance – of a particular leader. We believe that ethics is what defines leadership.

Bernard Bass, leadership historian and scholar, has observed: “There are almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept.”⁸ He is right. Having said this, the following definition encapsulates our most basic and shared convictions about leadership:

Leadership is a power-laden, value-based and ethically driven relationship between leaders and followers who share a common vision and accomplish real changes that reflect their mutual purpose and goals.

This definition has five basic components. Let’s look at them in the ascending order of their importance to the concept:

1 power-laden;

2 relationship between leaders and followers;

3 common vision;

4 accomplish real changes;

5 value-based and ethically driven.⁹

Power-laden

All forms of leadership make use of power. The term comes (indirectly) from the Latin adjective potis (“powerful, capable”) and verb posse (“to be able to”). Power is about control. To have power is to possess the capacity to control change or to direct it. Power need not be coercive, dictatorial, or punitive. It can be used in a non-coercive manner, for instance to orchestrate, mobilize, direct, and guide members of an institution or organization in the pursuit of a goal or series of objectives. The central issue of power in leadership is not “Will it be used?” but rather “Will it be used wisely and well?” In the best of all possible worlds, leaders who seek power should do so out of a sense of service, not for the purposes of personal aggrandizement and career advancement.

Relationship between leaders and followers

One of the most common errors in thinking about leadership is to focus on single individuals. But leadership does not reside exclusively in a single person. Rather it is a dynamic relationship, between leaders and followers alike. Leadership is always plural; it always occurs within the context of others. E. P. Hollander argues that, while the leader is the central and often the most vital part of the phenomenon of leadership, followers are necessary factors in the equation and often have an almost equal importance.

Without responsive followers there is no leadership . . . [Leadership] involves someone who exerts influence, and those who are influenced . . . The real “power” of a leader lies in his or her ability to influence followers.¹⁰

Leadership does not take place in a vacuum. Whether passively or actively, leaders cannot lead unless followers follow. “Leaders and followers,” James MacGregor Burns writes, “are engaged in a common enterprise; they are dependent on each other, their fortunes rise and fall together.”¹¹

Directly connected to the issue of followers is the time-honored question: Are leaders born or made? We believe that leaders, good or bad, great or small, arise from the needs and opportunities of a specific time and place. Great leaders require great causes, great issues, and, most importantly, a hungry and willing constituency. If this were not true, would there have been a Lech Walesa, a Martin Luther King, Jr., or a Nelson Mandela?

Common vision

The first job of leadership is to define reality. Leaders reach their goals by identifying, shaping, and representing the shared ideas and values of their organization. This constitutes the leader’s vision. Leadership is always ideologically driven and motivated by a philosophical perspective on the challenges facing the community. All leaders have an agenda – a series of beliefs, proposals, values, ideas, and issues they wish to put on the table. In fact, as Burns has suggested, leadership only asserts itself, and followers only become evident, when there is something at stake – ideas to be clarified, issues to be determined, values to be adjudicated.¹² President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this when he said: “All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”¹³ What is true of the presidency is true at every level of organizational life and leadership.

Accomplish real changes

All forms of leadership are about transformation. Leadership is not about maintaining the status quo; it is about initiating change in an organization. Simply sustaining the status quo is equivalent to institutional stagnation. “The leadership process,” says Burns, “must be defined . . . as carrying through from decision-making stages to the point of concrete changes in people’s lives, attitudes, behaviors [and] institutions.”¹⁴

This emphasis on change suggests the following formula for the emergence of leadership:

Although we are attempting to describe and define our ideal of leadership, all forms of leadership seek to accomplish results. To adapt the words of Vince Lombardi, when all is said and done, more should be done than said!¹⁵ Peter Drucker argued throughout his long career that leadership was all about performance and results. Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not by attributes.¹⁶ Leadership comes to be so that something gets accomplished, something gets changed for the better. Simply put, leaders who aren’t getting results aren’t truly leading. Or, more specifically, leaders who aren’t getting the desired results aren’t fulfilling their mandate.¹⁷

In their book Results-Based Leadership, Dave Ulrich, Jack Zenger, and Norm Smallwood convincingly argue that, while it is faddish in leadership literature to talk about leaders as people who master competencies and emanate character, neither of these accomplishments is enough. The authors argue that, although organizational capabilities such as agility, adaptability, or mission directedness and personal attributes like character, virtue, or ethics are vital, it is not enough simply to possess these qualities. Although skills and attributes consti...