The Secrets of Leadership Success

Campbell Lumbila April 27th, 2009

There is one thing that you should never sacrifice in your pursuit of success-your Character. Character is comprised of one’s moral qualities, ethical standards and principles. More  CEOs have lost their jobs to compromise in the area of character than to any other vice you can think of. Character is an asset that helps you build relationships of trust and mutual respect.  There are several ways to develop character:

1. Be guided by your principles.

A principle is a fundamental law from which others are derived.  In life, principles are your specific basis of conduct. In other words, you act or conduct yourself and your business in a certain way for a very specific reason. Your reasons must be morally and ethically sound. For example, one of my principles is never to use people for the advancement of my own agenda but rather partner with them so that both our agendas are fulfilled. My principles are informed by my religious beliefs and upbringing and yours might be influenced by other factors but morality and ethics are at the center of principle.

2. Learn from your Battles and those of Others

There is nothing that quickly and more effectively develops character like a good and hard fought battle.  Trials and tests have a way of bringing the best out of us as well as teaching us many lessons about life and the journey of success. Honesty, courage and integrity are all qualities of a person of character and they are developed most often than usual in the heat of self and externally imposed trials.

Now trials are different for each one of us. Take for example a young entrepreneur who is full of energy and vision and wants to succeed at all costs that he gets orders to supply a product he knows he can’t manage to produce to satisfy the demand. He gets down-payments but fails to deliver because his resources are over stretched. Now you might say that this is plan old ambition but when we look at it in the scope of character development, the young man just sacrificed his integrity and might have just ruined his business relationships forever. I will tell you that he will not make the same mistake twice and will learn from this experience that integrity and honesty are essentials for longevity in business.

As much as we all want to avoid battles, we must learn to embrace them so that we can be made into better people. I often say that the most dangerous person in the world is a successful man or woman without character because success itself will destroy them. If you are going to do the impossible things you were created to do, you must come to the understanding  that  Character is forged in the furnace of affliction, and as such embracing battles is in your best interest.

3. Regulate your Environment

As a leader I am mindful of the environment I create around me. Since I value character I want to work with people that have character. When I first began working with people I realized that most of them had never been in an environment that nurtures and develops their lives. In fact, most of us work in environments that empahsize production and quantity over character and quality. When we talk about quality in this case we are talking about the quality of the people making the product as well as the quality of the product itself. People of quality produce products of quality.

Therefore, you must create a character nourshing enviroment around you by politely and confidently confronting the vices that eat away at its fabric such as dishonesty, theft, exagerations and so on. This is also important for your personal relationships as well. Your associations often speak volumes about the direction in which your life is headed.

Character is an important key to your success, therefore, take your time to develop it.

• Character Development
• Comments(1)