The 5 Best Life & Leadership Lessons from Abraham Lincoln

Looking for role models when it comes to improving your leadership skills?

One excellent choice is Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday we celebrate each year in February. Abe was born in 1809, so it’s been 214 years since his arrival on the planet, and as much as things have changed since then, in some ways they have remained the same.?

Despite the amount of time that has passed, Lincoln still can teach us lessons about life and leadership that are worth learning. Here are five that are especially important for anyone who strives to be a leader:

• Show empathy and compassion. People sometimes think that leaders need to be stern and tough all the time, with a crack-the-whip approach. They see being kind and patient as a weakness, as an inability to make hard decisions. But that’s not the case. When we show empathy and compassion as leaders, we are expressing a willingness to hear people out, to understand their points of view.?

Lincoln understood this. He was the nation’s commander-in-chief at the most pivotal time in our nation’s history. The brutality surrounding the Civil War could have hardened him. Yet he made it a point to visit soldiers on battlefields and in hospitals, listening as they relayed their experiences. He heard their views on the resources they needed and the strategies they thought might work. They shared with him their overall view of the war, and he connected with them on a human level. Lincoln still needed to make difficult decisions, but those decisions came with a better understanding of and compassion for those left to carry out those decisions.

This lesson was brought home to me many years ago when I was a new leader handed responsibility for an office in Germany. I flew over and, without giving employees there a chance to share their perspectives, told them they must start using a customer relationship management system we used in the United States. After issuing the edict, I returned to the U.S., unknowingly leaving trouble behind me. The German office ran into issues immediately. I was eight hours away and no one there had any ownership of what was happening because it was my decision, made without input from any of them. It was a learning moment for me. Sometimes you do have to be decisive, but there is a way to do it to help people along on the journey. Listening intently, as well as having empathy and compassion fosters trust-filled relationships and understanding of what matters most to others.?

• Communicate through stories. Lincoln was quite the raconteur, as are many people in corporate leadership positions. Steve Jobs, for example, once said: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”?

Lincoln came from humble roots and had limited access to formal education and books. But he devoured whatever he read, and over time incorporated Shakespeare, the Bible, philosophy, poetry, and law into his communications, becoming a master storyteller. “Telling stories was the way he got known,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin once said in an interview .

As leaders, communication is central to our role. Yet too often we cut corners with communication, telling ourselves we’re too busy to do more than compose and share bare-bones information; words bereft of any life. We don’t engage our audiences with anecdotes or examples from real-life situations. We have so many ways to tell rich stories – email, PowerPoint, video, live presentations – yet we don’t always take advantage of the full capability of these tools. But if we take the time, we can communicate in ways that allow our messages to resonate with our audiences, and perhaps spur them to action.

• Guide debates and delegate decisions. Lincoln did not shy away from a good debate. Quite the contrary, he embraced debate, as demonstrated by the “team of rivals” he assembled in his Cabinet. Lincoln united these adversaries by inviting them to air their opposing viewpoints. He relied on their expertise and trusted their decisions, injecting his “final word” only when he felt that his team had fully debated the topic and reached an impasse.

Like me, you may not have always seen the wisdom in Lincoln’s approach. In my early years of leadership, I did not fully grasp the concept of “elevate and delegate.” I assumed that debates should only be conducted in private and that my team wanted me to make the decisions. But now, following Lincoln’s example, I have changed my approach. I see my role as a guide who helps my team seek issues to debate and I’m better at trusting and supporting the decisions of others. I have learned through Lincoln that my leadership presence has its biggest impact when my position of authority is least noticeable.

• Don’t think that winning must create losers. This is another difficult lesson for some people to grasp, especially considering our competitive society. But not everything in life needs to be stated as “I win, you lose,” and Lincoln understood that.?

Lincoln’s life was a 56-year showcase on how to live with grace and humility.? In the face of defeat, Lincoln pointed blame only at himself, and in the face of victory, he honored the opposition. Whether at work, at home, or in our communities, we cannot underestimate the importance of filling our lives with grace and humility amid victory or defeat. We cannot win people over by running them over.

Lincoln’s grace and humility are vivid in his two inaugural speeches. In the first, delivered in 1861, he said: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

In the second, delivered in March 1865, a month before his assassination, he said: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

In so many of our dealings with people, we should remember that we can strive to succeed without undermining others. As Lincoln has taught me, true success is achieved when winning does not create losers in one’s pursuit of victory.

• Determination and distress. Lincoln can seem much larger than life, thanks to the Lincoln Memorial and his vaunted place in American history, usually ranked first among presidents. But ultimately, he was a man like any other and endured stress as much as anyone – perhaps more than many.?

His early political career was rife with election defeat. He suffered from depression, mourned the death of two sons, and took office as the Civil War threatened to tear the nation apart. Yet, through all his woes, he remained determined to create a more perfect union. He was the steady hand the nation needed at that moment, even if privately his positive thoughts often sank into unsteady, depressed ones. This quote from him perhaps sums up his philosophy about determination and distress: “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”

This is an important lesson Lincoln leaves us because leadership is hard. There are days (sometimes weeks on end) when the pressure of uncertainty is nearly unbearable and the passion to achieve is emotionally unsettling.?

But leadership is also an incredibly rewarding and joyful journey. As much as a young leader might not want to hear this, it probably takes about 50 years of living to be ready to embody the leadership principles of Lincoln. It takes a few decades of learning, struggling, and appreciating the complexity of life that is interwoven into leadership.?

Perhaps one of the best leadership lessons we can learn from Lincoln is this: When we make a great effort to lead with compassion, communicate well, and do all of these other things, the legacy we leave behind can still resonate with others long after we are gone.

— Chris