Introduction

Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things.

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)
English trader, writer, journalist, and spy
The True-Born Englishman (1701)

LEADERSHIP IS A TOPIC CROWDED WITH ABSURD THEORIES. Over the years we have celebrated the absurdities. We have jumped from one superstition to another. We’ve bedeviled ourselves with trends and fashions. We’ve changed “hues and views to fit the situation.” Out of a simple concept, we have created a myth-making industry, a platitudinous art, an intellectual toy. We’ve made it too complicated, and in many cases the theories we’ve hatched are dangerously misleading. Consider the following strains of thought.

Ten Misleading Leadership Theories

1．Leadership is about charisma. If you have personal magnetism, dash, and style, you are a leader.

2．Leadership is about eloquence. If you have Churchillian powers of expression, you are a leader.

3．Leadership is about power. If you are a chief executive officer (CEO) or a bemedaled general, you are a leader.

4．Leadership is about seniority. If you have outlived everyone else, you are a leader.

5．Leadership is about scale. If you work on the important issues of the day, you are a leader.

6．Leadership is about popularity. If everyone likes you, you are a leader.

7．Leadership is about fame. If you are known far and wide, you are a leader.

8．Leadership is about winning. If you have beat your opponents, you are a leader.

9．Leadership is about wealth. If you have money, you are a leader.

10．Leadership is about education. If you are degreed and credentialed, you are a leader.

 

I know people who possess all of these things and are not leaders. I know others who possess none of these things and are. These ideas represent bad philosophy, and, as writer C. S. Lewis said, “bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

It needs to be answered because otherwise people go away confused and discouraged. I’m not saying these things have nothing to do with leadership. They may point at the possibility, but they make no promises. Frankly, we have yet to recover from these seductive delusions.

The Essence of Leadership

What, then, is the kernel of this concept we call leadership? Novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann wrote, “Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.”

I have asked thousands of people around the world this simple question: What single word best captures the concept of leadership? Put on some noise-cancelling headphones while I tell you the answer. Leadership is not an ethereal concept. It is not as cinematic as you might think. It’s about one simple and profoundly human thing: influence.

Yes, the essence of leadership is influence.

But it’s not just any kind of influence. It must aim at something good, something noble, something that builds, lifts, and makes better. In its purest sense, leadership is about influencing people to climb, stretch, and become. And it’s not about the scope of your stewardship; influencing the one is just as worthy as influencing the many.

For example, I crashed into another car driving out of a parking lot the other day. It was my fault. What happened next was stunning. The man whose car I hit was perfectly calm and unstintingly kind. I smashed his Lexus and ruined his day, and here he was, setting an example of patience and composure. It was a simple, brief, one-on-one encounter and yet an awesome display of influence and a clinic in leadership.

How do you exercise leadership? How do you generate this kind of influence? Not much to demystify here. The mechanism is primarily modeling behavior. It’s about walking the talk through your living, breathing example. Psychologist Albert Bandura captured the principle: “Most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”

Humans are social animals. We influence one another in a continuous, uninterruptible, and reciprocal process. You cannot wake up and say, “I don’t want to influence anyone today.” If you are interacting with people, you are influencing them and they are influencing you. Even your absence influences others.

The question is: How will you influence and toward what end will you influence? This fact never changes, but the conditions around us do. Increasingly, we influence under conditions of radical transparency. Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical, observes, “Now, the judge, the jury, the trial, the media, the speed of life, the world of social media—everything you do is scrutinized. Every word you utter, every place you go, what you do, how you do it.”

Figure I.1 The Spectrum of Influence

Think about influence on a spectrum (see figure I.1). At one end is manipulation. To influence through manipulation is to use deception to gain advantage. Manipulation can be mild and well meaning, as when a mother alternates apple sauce and pureed carrots on the spoon when feeding her baby. It can also be predatory and destructive, as when payday loan companies lure the working poor into misleading contracts that charge usurious interest rates and trap them in a cycle of debt.

At the other end of the spectrum is coercion. People who coerce others press them into service. They muscle and force their way to achieve their aims. I once had a football coach at this end of the spectrum. Ironically, he would scream and demean and use abuse as his primary means of calling forth peak performance in his players.

Whereas manipulation exploits through subtle means, coercion controls through brute force. Here’s the principle: if you try to influence people through manipulation or coercion, you have abandoned legitimate forms of influence. You are not leading anymore.

In the middle of the spectrum is persuasion—the realm of true leadership.

If you lay down your tricks (manipulation) and your power tools (coercion), what else is there? The answer is persuasion based on character and competence. Out of character flows the confidence that you can be trusted to do the job. Out of competence flows the confidence that you know how to do the job. A great leader influences through the combined credibility of character and competence—no duplicity, no intimidation, no fear, no threats, and no betrayal.

Thirty years ago I served as a missionary in Korea. My first assignment was to go to the rural province of Kang Won and apprentice with an experienced native Korean missionary named Soe Yang Shik. It was a humorous case of the West and the East coming together. I was 6 foot 5 inches tall. He was 5 foot 5 inches tall. I couldn’t speak Korean. He couldn’t speak English. And then it all began. We worked from sunup till sundown. He helped me learn the language. He helped me learn to use my chopsticks so I wouldn’t starve. He taught me how to plan, organize, and carry out humanitarian projects. He taught me how to teach and serve people. To this day he stands as one of my greatest mentors. How did he do it? He did it without manipulation or coercion. It was pure and powerful persuasion based on a combination of character and competence.

People perceive influence patterns in others very quickly. If you get a new boss, coach, teacher, or friend, you observe that individual. You look for influence patterns and then apply predictive analytics based on what you see. Intuitively, you run a trust equation and respond accordingly. If you see patterns of manipulation or coercion, you naturally retreat and focus on risk management, self-preservation, and pain avoidance. If, on the other hand, that person promotes psychological safety through patterns of persuasion, you respond with trust, commitment, and higher performance. You reciprocate with more discretionary effort. You do not trust power; you rely on the power of trust.

Leadership Is an Applied Discipline

Now consider the oppressive myth that leadership is about title, position, and authority. These things are merely accessories. In this world we elect presidents, appoint CEOs, and, in about four dozen cases, still crown kings and queens. But there is no coronation of leaders in the true sense of the word. To robe yourself in the outward vestments of a leader does not make you one. That kind of equipment is visible evidence of power, but please do not mistake it for leadership. The formal conferral of authority no more makes you a leader than a black turtleneck makes you the CEO of a tech company. Rank can only hint at the possibility. That’s all.

I meet scores of individual contributors who are convinced that they are not leaders because they possess no formal status. I also meet scores of managers who think they are simply because they do. Both groups are terribly wrong.

Under intensifying pressure to become flat, lean, and competitive, organizations today ask employees at every level to step up and be leaders—to lead from every level, every seat, and every role. And yet most employees hold no title, position, or authority. It doesn’t matter. Leaders who develop character and competence become scalable in their impact, regardless of their role. In business organizations, governments, schools, and families, they become force multipliers. They create more value for their organizations, more success for others, and more opportunities for themselves.

Leadership is an applied discipline, not a foamy concept. In fact, it is the single most important applied discipline in the world. It’s a factor in every decision and every outcome. In every human collective—the family, the fourth-grade classroom, the multinational corporation, the repertory dance theatre, the start-up, and the monkish order—performance is always traceable to leadership. And true leadership is always traceable to influence based on credibility forged from character and competence.

Leadership is the most engaging, inspiring, and deeply satisfying activity known to humankind. Through leadership we have the opportunity to progress, overcome adversity, change lives, and bless the species. The beautiful thing about leadership is that anyone can aspire to it. It’s within reach if you are willing to learn, work, and get out of your own way. Leadership scholars Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus wrote, “The truth is that major capacities and competencies of leadership can be learned…. Whatever natural endowments we bring to the role of leadership, they can be enhanced.”

Character and Competence

To become a better leader, you will need both character and competence—character to influence positively and competence to influence effectively. The two bleed into each other. Having one does not cancel the need for the other or compensate for a lack of the other. Leaders do not make decisions based on character or competence alone. The two domains are overlapping magisteria: the heart and the head, motive and skill, intent and technique, moral strength and intellectual horsepower.

For example, judgment is a combination of integrity and knowledge. Productivity is a combination of discipline and skill. Collaboration is a combination of humility and communication. Character needs competence and competence needs character. Character is the core. Competence is the crust. Together they represent leadership’s irreducible minimum (see figure I.2).

Character represents the truth of who you are and what you stand for. It’s a basic measure of your moral makeup and the degree to which you govern yourself from the inside based on values and a self-imposed ethical creed. William Wordsworth described the leader of character as one

Figure I.2 The Core of Character and the Crust of Competence

Whose high endeavors are an inward light

That makes the path before him always bright.

 

The core of character does not have anything to do with technical expertise, charismatic arts, grasp of strategy, or a host of other technical and professional stuff. That kind of skill, knowledge, experience—that’s all competence. Abraham Lincoln is purported to have said, “Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it, but the tree is the real thing.”

When we speak of character, we are talking about the unvarnished, unedited truth of how you think and behave, as well as how you regard and treat yourself and other people. It flows from the empire of the heart.

Think about high-profile leaders. Name a spectacular fall from grace that was about a lack of competence. When leaders go down hard, they go down from the inside out. It’s a collapse of character, a core meltdown. Would you rather go into battle with a charismatic leader with a liquid core or a dull leader with a titanium center? British statesman Thomas Macaulay once said of himself, “It is not necessary to my happiness that I should sit in Parliament; but it is necessary to my happiness that I should possess, in Parliament or out of Parliament, the consciousness of having done what is right.”

That is a man of character speaking.

It is more than antiquarian charm to say that leaders should be honest and morally excellent. Society depends on it. That is why leadership is the ultimate applied discipline, and being a good one is the worthy quest of a lifetime. There is no shortcut, formula, or tonic. Becoming a great leader requires honest toil—social, emotional, intellectual, and moral exertion. The process is simple but not easy. Don’t confuse the two.

The Four Types of Leaders

A character-plus-competence conception of leadership produces four types of leaders that have nothing to do with title, position, or authority. Rather these types describe how a leader feels, thinks, and behaves. If you look around, you will see that leaders do indeed cluster around these four types (see figure I.3).

Great leaders (high character + high competence). If you are strong on both accounts, you have the opportunity to make a difference—a positive and substantial difference in the lives of those around you—through your influence. This should be your goal. Strong character and competence will bring greater depth and breadth to your offering as a leader. It will allow you to make your fullest and finest contribution.

Specifically, a strong core will keep you safe from your own betrayal. It will allow you to avoid excessive affectation, jealous ambition, and a love affair with power. To have strong character and competence is to have both the intent and the capacity to make an impact. The lack of leaders in this category is society’s most acute need.

Figure I.3 The Four Types of Leaders

Ineffective leaders (high character + low competence). An ineffective leader is a person of basic upright character who unfortunately lacks the skills. The typical pattern of an ineffective leader is a lack of drive rather than a lack of intellect. Leaders in this category have a morbid propensity to procrastinate. Out of fear, entitlement, or laziness, ineffective leaders avoid exertion. They consistently refuse to leave their comfort zones and stretch to their outer limits. Ineffective leaders who have drive do not remain ineffective for long. They get better, even if at a slow pace.

Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman asserts, “Laziness is built deep into our nature.” I would qualify that and say that laziness is built into our physical and mental makeup, but those who are determined can overcome it and develop astonishing discipline. Even the least gifted leaders can escape incompetence with raw effort. Unfortunately, the number of ineffective leaders is growing as the pace of change accelerates. You can find yourself in the ineffective category by simply standing still. Just coast awhile, and your relevance will melt away as you slip into a cycle of obsolescence.

We may trust incompetent leaders personally, but we can’t trust them professionally. They may be our friends, and we may have great affection for them, but we can’t rely on them to lead us, particularly in the accelerated, compressed, and volatile twenty-first century. We don’t have that kind of margin for error. The risk is too great and the stakes are too high.

Failed leaders (low character + low competence). Failed leaders misspend their lives primarily because they refuse to hold themselves accountable. Rather than reflect on their performance in the spirit of humility and openness, they ignore feedback and deflect personal responsibility. This is the root of their failure: They never learn to delay gratification, acknowledge the inherent value of other people, or respect the principles of work and earned achievement. They hold but one conviction—a sense of their own entitlement. You will often find that they have risen to positon through flattery and the trading of favors.

Failed leaders crave rank because they can hide behind it and wage a war of self-preservation. Devoid of purpose outside of themselves, failed leaders are imposters who feed on aggrandizement. They advocate privilege based on position and connections because they cannot claim leadership on merit and they have no desire to. They are counterfeits, imposters, and pharisees devoted to image and appearance.

Dangerous leaders (low character + high competence). It’s one thing to have immoral intent, but what happens when you combine corruption with skill? A dangerous leader is a person who splices intelligence with crooked character—a clever person with undiminished ambition and unrestrained moral ties, a person who trades integrity for money, economic man personified, a creature who obsesses on maximizing personal gain, a human vending machine.

I hear people say that leaders need to be authentic and true to what they believe in. What if you don’t believe in anything but yourself? By definition, your leadership will be manipulative or coercive. Out of a mercenary spirit, you will seek to use people rather than serve them, as many malevolent geniuses have done in what becomes a struggle for power or, as one author calls it, “the battle of cold steel.”

I had a famous professor at Oxford make this terrifying statement: “My colleagues and I agree on almost nothing, but the one thing we do agree on is not to believe in anything too much.” Leaders who do not believe in anything are susceptible to becoming profoundly self-absorbed and dedicating their lives to the unquenchable pursuit of self-interest. As dangerous leaders mischannel their drive, they become a growing menace to their fellows. Some become human jackals. Many of the most commanding leaders in history—those who have wielded vast influence over humankind, and many with appalling capacity—have been members of this type. They become petty tyrants who mouth big ideas, drawing people under their spell from the dark side of charisma.

When a leader has significant capacity and directs that capacity toward dark, selfish, or trivial ends, people and performance suffer. Teddy Roosevelt captured the essence of the dangerous leader when he said, “Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man’s own advancement.”

In our day business magnate and philanthropist Warren Buffett put it this way: “In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.” Talented people especially seem to have a highly developed sense of smell for dangerous leaders; if a leader doesn’t pass the character smell test, they resist that leader’s influence or simply leave.

Becoming a Great Leader

What activist and philosopher Thomas Paine said of freedom applies equally to leadership: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods.” Neither character nor competence is free. The good news is that leadership does not require the credentials of title, position, or authority. Nor are you birthmarked a leader. Leadership is a learnable skill. It comes down to your patterns of belief, thought, and behavior and how those patterns influence others.

In this book we consider both character and competence. In part one we discuss the four cornerstones of character: integrity, humility, accountability, and courage. In part two we talk about the four cornerstones of competence: learning, change, judgment, and vision. Are there other attributes of character and competence? Of course. My purpose here is to address the threshold requirements. Your part is to take personal inventory and make sustainable behavioral change on the path of becoming a better leader.

Making Sustainable Behavioral Change

I offer the following three suggestions for making sustainable behavioral change.

Own your own development. First keep in mind the iron law of personal development: All sustainable personal development is based on a transfer of ownership to the individual. This means that nothing happens until you find a deep personal commitment to make it happen. If you own it, you can achieve positive behavioral change and sustain it. If you don’t, the shelf life of emotion will expire and you’ll experience the classic failure pattern that we call a regression to the mean. You will simply revert to your old equilibrium and comfort zone.

Maintain no more than two or three development priorities at a time. A portion of my personal consulting practice involves coaching executives. From my accumulated experience, it’s clear that a person can only focus on only two or three things at a time. I have seen individuals get a little too excited and come back to me with five or six development goals. That kind of scope is developmentally overwhelming, dangerously dilutes effort, and leads to discouragement and failure. Make your goals specific and behavioral, create detailed plans to improve, and give them intense focus and disproportionate attention.

Keep a clean mirror. Begin your personal development process with a healthy dose of self-awareness—an enabling precondition for personal development. Without it you have no bearings to comprehend your true position, so there’s a good chance you will wander without solid and cumulative progress over time. But if you carefully examine yourself and maintain a diet of undiluted feedback, you will move the needle.

How to Read this Book

I am not offering a step-by-step, turnkey solution because the quest to become a better leader is not a tidy, linear process. You can’t package leadership like a diet or an exercise regimen. Improvement is a gritty, lifelong process, and we are all in different stages, working on different things. You have my permission to start reading anywhere. If you need to work on humility, read that chapter first. If developing better judgment is your priority, go there. I hope you’ll see the book as an on-demand resource that you can read based on need.