Character: The Bedrock of Leadership Legitimacy

When identifying an effective leader, the question arises, “what legitimizes someone as a leader?” I understand that this question depends on scope and field of leadership. However, for the sake of this brief article, allow me to speak broadly of leadership within a variety of fields, whereby leadership is at least remotely defined as someone with the express responsibility of directing those connected to an organization, institution, or cause toward a purpose larger than themselves.

What legitimizes someone with that responsibility? How do we know if that person has what it takes to be a leader? Unfortunately, here’s where I feel that in an image conscious world, we get a bit derailed in our assessments.

When assessing a leader’s legitimacy, we are often prone to point to three externally available criteria:

1. Competency: How good are they at what they do? Being good at something should make someone worth following...right?
2. Capacity: What position, role, title, success, or esteem have they held in the past? What is their future ceiling? Are they a star awaiting the right opportunity? 
3. Charisma: How much relational “woo” do they possess? Is there a gravitational force around their personality? Do they have the capacity to excite, motivate and move people? 

Each of those elements is an important factor in assessing one’s possibilities of leadership, though none alone legitimizes a leader. When any of these elements alone, outside a more robust criteria, are used as justification for choosing, promoting, or following a leader, we build our organization’s, institution’s, or cause’s future on a very flimsy platform.

• Leadership based on competency alone creates celebrities not servants.
• Leadership based on capacity alone leads to egocentric positional authority not collaborative empowerment. 
• Leadership built on charisma alone is fluff, shaped by a cult of personality, instead of substantive vision around which all of us cohere. 

Though easily accessible as external criteria, leadership legitimacy isn’t one’s sole possession of any one element or the sum total of all three. Leadership legitimacy demands a more robust criteria. That criteria is “character.” Character is the bedrock on which one’s leadership legitimacy is built. Though it’s impossible to lead a group without some measure of each of the above elements, any leadership without character comes crumbling to the ground. 

So how do we define character? Well, because I’m a preacher at heart...I’ll forge on with the alliteration. This episode is sponsored by the letter “C.” I would suggest that character has everything to do with a life lived in consistent alignment (and in humble realignment) to a governing set of principles that renders one credible, courageous, compassionate, convicted, conscious, and confessional.

Briefly, character is expressed in a life that is:

1. Credible – A leader of character lives a life that is genuine, authentic, vulnerable and consistent. Credibility refuses to put on a façade, but demonstrates a predictability based on one’s self-possession.
   
   
2. Courageous – Leaders without character are often opportunistic or complicit. Characterless leaders will seize opportunity by placating to the demands and expectations of others and complicit in corruption for personal gain. Leaders of character will make courageous decisions, especially when costly, because it is right.
   
   
3. Compassionate – Leaders of character, having reckoned with themselves, are open to the struggles, trials, and pain of others. They refuse to treat others as cogs in their machine and instead value them as vital contributors to the pursuit of purpose. When people suffer, the leader feels with them. 
   
   
4. Convicted – Leaders of character are committed to a higher sense of ideals. They don’t live an ad hoc life where they determine what is right (advantageous) in an any given moment depending on which way the wind blows. Their conviction about the right, good, true and noble runs deep and they’ve distilled that in an organization so deeply that in their absence those they lead can make decisions in their stead. 
   
   
5. Conscious – Leaders of character are self-aware. They are conscious of the impact they have, the words they speak, their emotional well-being, and they steward this influence for the sake of others not self-promotion. 
   
   
6. Confessional – Leaders of character screw up. However, instead of spineless cowards that attempt to cover up, double down, or justify their misdeeds, they confess their culpability, seek forgiveness, adopt a growth mentality, and seek to do better in the future. 

Only leaders of character are legitimate leaders. Many have the title, but the title alone doesn’t legitimize a leader. Without character, posers ascend flimsy platforms in pursuit of self-promotion, wrecking the work of those they lead.