The 4 Types of Leaders

Combining character and competence gives you four possible types of leaders:

1. 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. 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, strong character 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.

2. 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. Even the least gifted 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.

3. 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 position 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 feed on aggrandizement and advocate privilege based on position and connections because they cannot claim leadership on merit and they have no desire to. They are counterfeits, impostors, and pharisees devoted to image and appearance.

4. 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 mixes 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 mis-channel 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.

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.”

Every leader on the planet leans toward one of these four categories. The good news is that the "great leader" category is open to all comers!

(Excerpt: Leading with Character and Competence: Moving Beyond Title, Position, and Authority (Berrett-Koehler).