It’s said that character is 90% of leadership. So to start the year, what a good reminder from p.111 of our 8 Essentials of Leading Teams by Os Guinness. Enjoy….
The route, which we will take here, is to trace the development of the strongest Western position on cultivating character—the biblical heritage, both Jewish and Christian. The first essential for cultivating good character is understanding God’s character. The idea of holiness is alien to modern ears, but without it, human character loses both its substance and its standard. When the holiness of God is understood and taken into account, then and only then does human character have its divine North Star to guide its direction. Then virtue knows its content, the idea of “saints” find its pattern and the notion of human justice find its own final judge.
Building on the foundation of the character of God himself, a second essential for good character is the capacity for deep, lasting change—where needed. Without it, a flaw is a flaw is a flaw and no amount of good resolution, pulling oneself “up by the bootstraps,” or astute public relations can alter the fact.
A third essential for cultivating good character is moral accountability. We never escape the need for ongoing or mid-course correction.
A fourth essential for cultivating character is renunciation—the ability to say a decisive “NO” to bad habits that threaten to enslave us. Most of us run our lives from our “to do” lists. The creation and disciplined use of a “stop doing” list is just as important. Instead of the catch phrase “getting to yes” try empowering “getting to no” in your life.
A fifth essential is forgiveness. Nothing is more certain in life than the fact that we will be hurt, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in word or deed, through the pinprick of a slight or the knife of malice. What matters for character is how we respond—with resentment and vindictiveness or with forgiveness and magnanimity.
A sixth essential is the discipline of secrecy—the freedom from needing to parade our virtue or seek public recognition for our good qualities and achievements. Most of us live depleted existences: weak, zestless, apprehensive, pessimistic, “neurotic.” And the reason is that when we perform a good deed, we advertise it, display it–and thus collect and enjoy the credit then and there. But when we do something cheap and mean, we carefully hide and deny it (if we can), with the result that the “credit” for acts of this kind remains with us and “accumulates.” A person who follow such a life style is chronically bankrupt in the moral and spiritual sense. The remedy is, quite simply, to reverse this whole strategy: admit and thus divest oneself of one’s weaknesses, errors, follies, and hide one’s charities, good deeds, virtues.
All italicized text taken from: When No One Sees by Os Guinness
BUILT TO LEAD 