Leadership, as Warren Bennis observed,
is like beauty: it is hard to define, but you
know it when you see it. Leadership is using oneself as an instrument to get things done in the organization, said Linda A Hill and Kent Lineback.1 Leaders and their leadership are seen by their candid exhibition of what they want, why they want it and how explicitly they make it known to others to gain their cooperation for achieving it. Hence, Bennis said: Becoming the leader is much the same as becoming an ‘integrated person’—which is synonymous with becoming yourself. The bottom line of it all is ‘character’.
Based on his 15 years of research work with more than 150 leaders, Warren Bennis asserts that “character is the key to leadership.” He goes on to say that research at Harvard University too indicates that 85% of a leader’s performance depends on his personal character.2 It is, however, difficult to quantify character. According to Oxford Dictionary, character means “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.” Alfred Gottschalk said, “Character is vital in a leader, the basis of everything else. … Character, perseverance, and imagination are the sine qua non of leadership.” William James, the great psychologist, describes character as “the particular mental or moral attitude [that makes one feel] most deeply and intensively active and alive, a voice inside which speaks and says, ‘This is the real me.’”3 The effective leaders know this inner voice. They understand it well. They also know that becoming an effective leader and becoming a fully integrated human being is one and the same. The followers, as Linda A Hill and Kent Lineback said, trust a leader when they believe that the leader is a man of competence and integrity—he is a man of character.
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