Two Battles All Leaders Must Fight
Character is the reason most leaders fail, but what causes most of our character failures? Why do some leaders succumb to the temptation to lie or cheat? Why do others avoid confrontations or demean their subordinates? Why do micromanagers micromanage?
Honestly, most resources do not go deep enough and get to the root cause of these failures. They just say, “Don’t do this,” or “Do this instead.” When writing our book, we realized we needed a different approach. We wanted to find the real cause for character failures, and we think we found the cause—actually, two causes!
As we began to outline our book Becoming a Leader of Character and determine the six Habits of Character leaders need to develop to become Leaders of Character, we placed Integrity at the very top of the list. We were not alone. Over and over again, great leadership experts and best-selling leadership books place Integrity first. This makes sense. Integrity is a critical Habit of Character that will determine whether people trust you, believe in you, and follow you.
Still, through our study on the topic of Integrity and through our own lives and observing the lives of other leaders, we recognized that to have Integrity we must first have Courage.
Fear
Fear is constantly working inside of us, convincing us to stay quiet because some action or choice is not worth the risk. That led us to ask, “Is it truly Integrity if we only tell the truth when there is no risk involved?” Fear prevents a lot of people from stepping forward and doing the right thing. Therefore, Integrity requires Courage! The great eighteenth-century British statesman Edmund Burke once said,
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
And many times good men and women do nothing because they lack the needed Courage to step out and challenge evil.
With that revelation, we looked at other topics on leadership and realized that Leaders of Character must have Courage to engage in positive conflict, to trust their people, or to put the needs of others ahead of their own needs.
Pride
Then we asked ourselves, “What other character flaws are at the root of most failures?” When we looked at issues such as micromanaging, arrogance, not listening to others, selfishness, and bad attitudes, the common denominator in those failures involved pride.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, pride was the original sin that caused Adam and Eve to eat the fruit God had forbidden them to eat in the Garden of Eden. You don’t have to be a Jew or a Christian to know that pride is present in all of us to some degree. Pride emerges in the form of either arrogance or insecurity, which are really two sides of the same coin. And they are the root cause of many leadership failures. Pride is an insidious character flaw that contributes to our leadership failures and our personal failures as well.
The opposite of pride is Humility. This virtuous habit is critical to becoming a Leader of Character and exhibiting Habits of Character, such as Duty, Selflessness, and Positivity.
Consider the items below:
- Integrity
- Trust
- Conflict resolution
- Coaching and developing others
- Listening skills
- Open communication
- Selflessness
- Empowering others
- Accountability
- Holding others accountable
- Results orientation
- Attitude
- Mentoring others
- Performance management
- Delegating
These traits and behaviors can be found on lists of core competencies many companies embrace. Human resource departments develop these for management classes that training departments teach. These are all leadership topics that companies, consultants, and authors try to address in order to improve leaders.
I can make an argument that fear and pride are the root cause for most of the failures experienced in the above areas. It doesn’t matter how these failures present themselves, whether in areas of integrity, trust, conflict resolution, or others. If we want to change the effectiveness of our leadership development efforts, we have to start at the root cause of the issues: fear and pride.
The Bottom Line:
To effectively counteract fear and pride, we must begin with the critical development of Courage and Humility—the two character habits that directly defeat fear and pride. If we fail to do this, we will keep treating the symptoms of leadership failures rather than their causes.
You see, I believe that 90 percent of all our failures in character can be traced back to an issue of fear or pride. This is why Part 2 of our book focuses on the habits of Courage and Humility.
We contend that without these two Habits of Character, the other habits we explore in Part 3—Integrity, Selflessness, Duty, and Positivity—are not possible. To some degree or another, Courage and Humility play a role in determining which Habits of Character we excel in or fail in.
We can all look back at our lives and see failures large and small. When we work our way down to the root cause of most of those failures, fear or pride and sometimes both are usually present. That is why Courage and Humility come first in our book and should come first as we all address our own character development.
Question:
Where do fear and pride create problems for you?