4. The Essential Virtues of Leadership
There are certain virtues that all leaders must necessarily embody, if they wish to properly fulfil their roles. They are few in number but wide-ranging in their effects, both for the leader and his or her team, and ultimately for the organization itself.
The essential virtues of leadership, derived in fact from ancient philosophy and Stoicism, are: integrity, courage, justice, temperance, prudence and wisdom. The leader must take care to always have these front of mind and furthermore to cultivate them on an ongoing basis, and for the duration of their careers.
If, at some point in your life, you should come across anything better than justice, prudence, self-control, courage … if you find anything better than that, embrace it without reservations – it must be an extraordinary thing indeed – and enjoy it to the full.
– Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher
Integrity or moral character. It must be there from the start. It must be there in the middle. And it must be there at the end. In other words, integrity must be there throughout, and it simply cannot be compromised, for it is truly the lodestar of leadership. Why do so many people of prominence – across all fields – fail to properly fulfill their roles, and bring dishonour both to themselves and to their organizations? For the oldest of reasons: lack of integrity.
Leadership is a demanding role of course. As the saying goes, it is “blood, sweat and tears.” It involves working hard towards excellence, over years and years, and even towards mastery. It means learning about human nature, developing ourselves, managing people, dealing with the real world and making tough decisions. And all this, of course, requires courage; courage to try, courage to tell the truth, courage to honour integrity under trying circumstances, and courage to take calculated risks.
Leaders must also uphold, and be models of, fairness and justice in their organizations. People must be treated well, and with a measure of equity, regardless of rank. Corporations must have goals and values of social welfare, beyond simple profit, both for the sake of their employees and society at large. Public sector leaders – whether administrators, judges or politicians – must work for an ethical and balanced use of public resources, and as always promote the general welfare. In other words, leaders must never forget that, by virtue of their honourable positions, they are representatives and stewards of Justice. And indeed, there is no healthy, moral and lasting society in the prolonged absence of Justice among its leaders and organizations.
Character is vital in the leader, the basis for everything else.
– Warren Bennis, Organizational consultant and pioneer of Leadership studies
One of the noticeable qualities of seasoned leaders is the ancient virtue of temperance, which nowadays we might call self-restraint and self-command. People in leadership roles have generally learned to develop a measure of real control and poise over their feelings, thoughts, likes and dislikes, interpersonal relations. In other words, they are even-keeled people, and have learned to become good captains of their own psychological and mental selves. In turn, this allows them to be quite skilled interpersonally, to serve as models for others, and indeed to be effective at leading teams.
This is really an essential virtue of leadership, for when it is absent all sorts of problems emerge both for the leader and his or her team. Serious absence of temperance or self-command – which is not uncommon – always results in disfunction both for the leader and for the group. In its extreme forms, if there is for example chronic anger or bullying, it can even cause toxic work environments.
Wherever noble, industrious, and intelligent men go, they flourish ...
– Musonius Rufus (1st c. AD), Stoic Philosopher
A leader must necessarily navigate various realms: managing people and resources, dealing with superiors, customer relations, and so on and so forth. At the higher levels of leadership, the areas of responsibility obviously increase quite a bit. In all these different areas, the leader must necessarily learn to develop a real measure of prudence. Prudence in handling ourselves and managing our careers. Prudence in dealing with other people, and especially those more powerful than ourselves, all the more so that there are all types of people in life. Prudence in managing resources and making tough decisions. And finally, Prudence in the more general arena of our organization, in market conditions, in assessing competition, and in larger economic cycles ... for much is at stake for organizations and an absence of sufficient foresight can be very costly. Indeed, sometimes entire corporations literally go under for lack of sufficient prudence among members of its top leadership.
Finally, the last of the leadership virtues, and the crowning one, is Wisdom. Wisdom in a leader is an essential faculty, that necessarily develops gradually, over the years. It depends upon the existential, and professional, experience accumulated by the leader across his various roles at work and in life. Wisdom, distilled to its essence, is a real knowledge of self, of others, of interpersonal relations, of how to handle a whole variety of situations, of how the real world and life itself function ... It is what you would call practical know-how, in both the work and life realms (which, in reality, are always intertwined to various degrees). Wisdom is also the commanding and overarching virtue, which knows how to integrate and direct all the other virtues, whether integrity, courage, justice, temperance or prudence. Real self-command, knowledge of the variety of human temperaments, a deep understanding of the work world, extensive life experience, all these coalesce into the greatest of the virtues: worldly wisdom. And in turn, this crowning virtue allows you to navigate effectively through all the variations that are to be found in work and life, and which leaders must necessarily face.
Putting it into Practice
Learn about your areas of personal difficulty and make a point to cultivate countervailing virtues to help remedy these weaknesses. If, for example, you have a bad temper, you know that you must work on developing your temperance, or self-command, on an on-going basis.
Focus your efforts on a different virtue every month, through personal practice, readings and teachings in your philosophical or spiritual tradition.
Have advisors and mentors who can support you and help you develop the virtues of leadership, through on-going mentoring.
Make a point to reflect on your own experience, and integrate practical learnings and wisdom, in an on-going fashion, in your professional and personal life.