Great and Good: The best definition of leadership is not found in business books or academic texts
The US military’s definition of leadership combines being Great (competence and change) with being Good (character).
What do we mean by “leadership”?
Coming up with an answer to define leadership can be difficult. James MacGregor Burns, historian and presidential biographer, once called leadership “one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.”
The late Warren Bennis, one of the pioneers of leadership studies, seconds Burns’ observation that leadership has been well observed but not easily understood:
“Decades of academic analysis have given us more than 350 definitions of leadership. Literally, thousands of empirical investigations of leaders have been conducted in the last 75 years alone, but no clear and unequivocal understanding exists as to what distinguishes leaders from non-leaders and what distinguishes effective leaders from ineffective leaders.” – Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus
So you are not alone if you are a bit perplexed on what leadership is. It’s always been a contentious topic in business, politics and society at large. And when there is a crisis there’s always a cry for leadership, a hunger and craving for someone to get leadership right.
At The Leaders Workout we believe the ideal leader strives to be Great (extra-ordinary achievement through competence and mastering change) and Good (living a virtuous life through exemplary character). It is this combination that attracts followers, inspires others and leads to the accomplishment of a worthy mission.
As I (Tom) began my transition to the business world I learned there were a number of definitions of leadership frequently used by business people, coaches and academics. There was transformational vs transactional leadership, situational leadership, charismatic leadership, leadership traits, the moral leader, the servant leader, male vs female leadership styles and many others.
There are a lot of insights and partial truths to all these definitions. But as I reflected on my leadership experience at West Point and the military I realized something was missing.
The wisdom of the world’s greatest leadership training organization
Here is an interesting conversation that happened several years ago …
“Three years ago, in the midst of the Internet bubble, our dinner party at the landmark Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan listened raptly to Peter Drucker, the Father of Modern Management, and Jack Welch, the then widely admired CEO of America’s most admired company.
The question before us: Who does the best job developing leaders?
To my surprise, the usual suspects so often cited for finding the training leaders didn’t figure – not the Harvard Business School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey & Company, or General Electric, or IBM or Procter & Gamble.
The enthusiastic choice of both of these management legends was the United States military.”
– Richard E. Cavanagh, from the Forward of the book “Be, Know, Do: Leadership the Army Way
Having begun my career in the military, of course I am biased. But when the world’s foremost management thinker and one of the most accomplished CEO’s talk about leadership development, we should listen. That exchange that I read led me to reflect on the actual definition of leadership I was taught in the military:
Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization. ~ Army Leadership Doctrine (ADRP 6-22)
Reflecting on this insight of leadership wisdom, I saw there were three important parts of leadership in the US Army’s definition:
influence: providing inspiration and direction through a leader’s character
accomplishing the mission: through a leaders’ competence
improving the organization: through a leader’s ability to guide and direct growth through change
Great and Good - Megalos kai Kalos
“They’re only truly great who are truly good.” – George Chapman, 1559-1634, English dramatist, translator, and poet; translator of Homer
We can further simplify the military’s definition of ideal leadership: great achievement (competence and change) and good morals (character).
I discovered that this simplified leadership definition – Great and Good – was actually an ideal started by the Greeks and a recurring notion used to describe leaders past and present.
The Greeks used the epithet, megalos kai kalos – Great and Good – to describe the ideal leader.
Let’s look at the meaning of these words individually and how their combined usage forms a unique expression of the character and conduct of an individual.
Megalos is the Greek word for great, large and grand.
We see this word used in English in the formation of compound words like:
Megalomania – excessive obsession with wealth, power or extravagant things
Megastructures nationalgeographic.com - the National Geographic documentary series– a focus on extreme construction projects “in the sense that they are the biggest, tallest, longest, or deepest in the world”
Megaprojects wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject - these are “ large-scale, complex ventures that typically cost $1 billion or more, take many years to develop and build, involve multiple public and private stakeholders, are transformational, and impact millions of people”
Megalopyschia - This an ancient Greek word that means ‘greatness of soul’. It’s become known in modern vernacular through the Latin translation of the word – magnanimity.
The second word in our leadership epithet is Kalos.
“Beauty serves … to prepare the soul for …encounter with God.” – Nicholas Arseniev
Kalos is another classical Greek word that means beauty. Beauty in this sense encompasses meanings of words such as good, moral, virtuous and noble. Kalos is the ideal of beauty in the physical and moral sense, especially as perceived by Greek philosophers. The famous Russian writer Dostoyevsky wisely observed, “Beauty will save the world.” The book of Orthodox Christian wisdom – a collection of texts of spiritual masters from the 4th to the 15th century – is called Philokalia - love of the beautiful en.orthodoxwiki.org/Philokalia.
“Beauty is Truth
Truth is Beauty
That is all you need
To know. – Keats
Megalos kai kalos – Great and Good. I kept on seeing this expression of “Great and Good” in my readings of accomplished leaders of character and competence.
When the famous 19th century romantic English poet Lord Bryron died participating in the Hellenic struggle for independence begun in 1821, here is how the Greeks remembered him:
“In Greece he is still revered as no other foreigner, and as very few Greeks, and like a Homeric hero he is accorded an honorific standard epithet, megalos kai kalos, a great and good man.” – David Brewer
Here is Frederick Douglas’ dedication to a monument honoring Lincoln in 1876:
“..there is little necessity on this occasion to speak at length and critically of this great and good man [my italics], and high mission in the world.”
Staying with the civil war period, author Alice Rains Trulock describes the famous former college professor who became the hero of the Battle of Gettysburg in a similar manner:
"Joshua L. Chamberlain was a great American hero and a genuinely good man." - In the hands of providence
In the area of statesmanship we see the observation of the character and conduct of the late UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold;
“The conviction when one has finished [Markings, Hammarskjold’s journal] is that one has had the privilege of being in contact with a great, good and lovable man” – WH Auden
Even when these words Great and Good are not used we still see the impact of the concept. Here is how the author and sports journalist Ralph Wiley summarized the life of the baseball legend Jackie Robinson:
“Jackie Robinson’s life was built around service to an idea, ideal, or a cause. He was always at the service of something or someone: UCLA, the US Army, the Dodgers, the Republican Party, Branch Rickey, the NAACP. He was a champion that way to all people, not just blacks. Very few in history ever have had that.”
When we read that Jackie Robinson was a champion in selfless service of an ideal, or cause, we are really saying he was Great and Good.
In his book Good to Great Jim Collins highlights the criteria of professional competence and personal excellence needed to lead a good company to become a great one:
“We were surprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities the good-to-great leaders seem to come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy – these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.”
Professional competence and personal excellence are other ways to state Great and Good.
Greatness is about what we make happen. Goodness is how we make things happen.
Greatness is about doing. Goodness is about being.
To get Great results, you need leaders with Good character.