Is the Model the Answer or the Question

I have never been confident at math. This may sound strange coming from someone with seventeen years experience in the banking industry. Especially when those years included seven years in loan portfolio risk management. Nonetheless, I have never been confident with math. Perhaps that's the reason I don't like formulas for leadership.

Over the past few years, countless books and articles have appeared espousing formulas for leadership success. There is nothing wrong conceptually with the idea of leadership having certain elements but when those elements are boiled down into equations based on best practice research I become very suspect.

For this reason the character of leadership model and its seven elements (faith, justice, temperance, hope, wisdom, love and courage) is more a question about the connection between character and leadership; rather than the answer. I do believe the model we uncovered is comprehensive enough to encompass all that a leader needs to be, but I also believe it to be flexible enough to be tailored to specific situations.

In a recent discussion in one of my LinkedIn groups someone proposed that the central element of the model should be love, not faith as we proposed. The argument was a good one and for that organization and that individual, a rearrangement of the elements could be in order.

My hope with the book is to engage the leadership community (whatever that is) in the discussion of character and leadership because from my point of view the challenges we face are not economic, environmental, social or legal; they are challenges of character and leadership.