The Essence of Great Leadership

American Generalship: Character is Everything: The Art of Command by Edgar F. Puryear Jr.

The above referenced book is one of the finest I have read on the subject of leadership. You may be asking yourself what the study of military leadership can offer those of us in the corporate world. For starters, think about this – the freedom of the United States and the world rests upon the quality of this leadership. In this context, military leadership is ultimate. That said, comparisons between war and business must be drawn with care; after all, several key military functions are not shared by business. Take, for example, that of deterrence – what business would devote the resources spent on nuclear weaponry and then not use them? Additionally, militaries represent a monopoly of sorts, so how they exert force in provisioning their “products and services” is considerably different than that of businesses. These and other contrasts notwithstanding, the ability to cope with uncertainty more rapidly than opposing organizations is critical to both military science and business management. Fundamentally, this ability boils down to leadership and who better to learn from than American military leaders?

Puryear’s book purposes to help us determine how our nation’s great military leaders developed and obtained their insights on how to lead successfully. To do this, he invested 35 years interviewing more than a hundred four-star generals and more than a thousand officers of the rank of brigadier general and higher. What a debt of gratitude we owe these men – and those who served under them – for their shining examples of service to our country. In considering how these men rose to such vaulted leadership ranks, the question naturally arises: Are leaders born or made? I look forward to tackling this in a subsequent article, but first let us consider what the author considers the most important aspect of leadership – character.

I agree with Puryear that character is everything in successful leadership, but after that we part company pretty quickly on this topic (it is the only one where I found myself disagreeing with him). For example, he states the following: “This book has as its purpose the objective of giving life and meaning to what character is. It cannot really be defined. It must be described. And that is what this book endeavors to do.” It is mystifying, if not alarming, that neither Mr. Puryear nor the hundreds of military leaders he interviewed, can seemingly define character, yet they all argue that it is the essence of great leadership!

Albert Einstein once observed that problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them. In Einstein-like fashion, if you start with man in this case, the best you can hope to accomplish when it comes to defining character is what Mr. Puryear purports – a series of anecdotal glimpses at something otherwise illusive. I submit to you that if you want to define character, you must start with God. And if you don't believe in God, think about this: you have no logical grounds to believe in such a thing as ‘character’ in the first place because it is transcendent and immaterial. After all, an atheistic worldview only allows for material causes and effects and must dismiss the transcendent and immaterial. Such a worldview not only dismisses God, but things like character as well. But I digress…

The Bible essentially defines character as any behavior that reflects the character of God. We are told in the first book of the Bible (Genesis) that God created man in His own image. As God’s image bearers, man reflects certain attributes of God. The Westminster divines answered the question, “What is God?” this way: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” The first three attributes – infinitude, eternality and immutability – are known as incommunicable attributes. In other words, they belong to God alone. The others – being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth – are communicable attributes that man derives from God, though profoundly marred by sin.

Let me ask you: Have you ever known a great leader who was unwise, puny, deceitful, unjust, evil and a liar? I didn’t think so. Make no mistake, great leaders the world over – to varying degrees – are marked by these communicable attributes. The link between character and leadership is everywhere apparent in Scripture. Take, for example, the statement that “righteousness exalts a nation” (Proverbs 14:34) and “a throne is established by righteousness” (Proverbs 16:12). If more leaders placed their trust in character’s defining Source instead of their own morality, there just may be fewer newspaper headlines heralding the fall of the mighty, from televangelists to General David Petraeus.