Hey, I'm still feeling quite under the weather so apologies for not posting longer, more thoughtful pieces.    In the meantime, a friend pointed me at this article in the WSJ where Jack Welch discusses what he looks for in a leader.  As a business person, Welch's words ring so true.   Because of WSJ's subscription screen, I'm going to excerpt larger tracts than usual -

Every time I speak to a group, I get asked about leadership. Mainly, people want to know how I feel about that age-old question: Are leaders born or made? And I always answer the same way: Who knows? What I do know is what leaders look and act like.

...Basically, my process assesses four essential traits of leadership (each one starting with an E, a nice coincidence). One, successful leaders have tons of positive energy. They can go go go; they love action and relish change. Two, they have the ability to energize others -- they love people and can inspire them to move mountains when they have to. Three, they have edge, the courage to make tough yes-or-no decisions -- no maybes. And finally, they can execute. They get the job done.

...If a candidate for a leadership role has the four E's, then you look for a final trait -- passion. By that I mean a heartfelt, deep and authentic excitement about life and work. People with passion care -- really care in their bones -- about neighbors, employees, colleagues and friends winning. They love to learn and grow themselves, and they get a kick when the people around them do the same.

Passion, luckily, can't be faked for very long, so this is usually a pretty easy call. Either people have a genuine zest for living and giving, or they're just showing up.

...Now, an important point. You absolutely cannot even start to think about the Four E's until you get a solid yes on two questions. First: Does the leadership candidate have integrity? That means, does he or she tell the truth, take responsibility for past actions, admit mistakes and fix them? Does he demonstrate fairness, loyalty, goodness, compassion? Does she listen to others? Does he truly value human dignity and voice? These may seem like fuzzy, subjective questions, but you have to get a strong "AMEN" in your gut to all of them to even consider a person as a leader.

Second: Before applying the Four E's, you have to ask, is the candidate intelligent? That doesn't mean a leader must have read Kant and Shakespeare (if it did, I would have been out of a job). It does mean the candidate has to have the breadth of knowledge, from history to science, which allows him to lead other smart people in a world that is getting more complex by the minute. Further, a leader's intelligence has to have a strong emotional component. He has to have high levels of self-awareness, maturity and self-control. She must be able to withstand the heat, handle setbacks and, when those lucky moments arise, enjoy success with equal parts of joy and humility. No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can't ignore it.

Leadership is the single most difficult skill to inculculate in a person.   I contend that it's perhaps the rarest of human qualities and thus the reason it is so incredibly well compensated.   Just about every abstract, difficult to measure / test human attribute is invoked (courage, self-assuredness, charisma, etc.) and wrapped up in this most critical of qualities. 

The looney left pleasures in caricaturing businessmen as heartless drones.  I counter that it's often harder to find a truer demonstration of the depths of the human experience than real business leadership in action.

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UPDATE - good rant from Jane Galt on Leadership, MBA's, IQ and GWB

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