The Character of Leadership: Introduction
When I was in high school, my dad, who was a pastor, was implementing a temperament profile as a teaching and counseling tool for himself and for a class he was teaching. It was a profile that identified certain temperaments and traits and then compared them to different persons in the Bible. He had me take this profile, and my matching biblical counterpart was Moses (who was described as a melancholy temperament, which seemed to match my temperament). This was a great learning experience for me, and probably my first introduction to personality profiles, and how they could help you understand yourself.
Recently, something reminded me of that experience, of learning about myself by looking at a biblical character (and in my case, Moses). But thinking about that character led me down a different path of thinking about two different uses of the word, character, and about how they can work together to help us learn more about leadership.
In the first use, a “character” is a person, often someone who plays a part in a story. It’s typically not a perfect person (in fact only Jesus was perfect), and often it is someone who is far from perfection. However, it is frequently an influential person, and in some form, an example from whom we can learn. Therefore, to understand a character is to know a little bit about who he/she was, and the context in which they lived or operated.
In the second use, as a separate definition, “character” is a trait or attribute that can be applied to that person and to his/her leadership. It is the identification of a particular behavior, attitude, or characteristic that defines the type of person they are, and is reflected in their conduct.
That word “character,” then, applies to both a person and an attribute. With that in mind, I think that there is lot that we can learn from the character of characters in the Bible. Therefore, there is great value for us in identifying biblical characters, and then identifying something that stands out in their character that can teach us something about who we are and how we lead. So for the next few weeks, and probably periodically after that, I want to select various people in the Bible and ask questions like, “Who is this character?” “What is their character?”, and “What do we learn from the character of this character?”.
I have often told my own children, “You learn most things from experience, but it’s usually less painful if it is someone else’s experience.” In this case, we are learning from someone else’s experience by looking at their character and the lessons of their successes and failures because of that character, and then seeing how to put the character of that character into practice in our own lives. We are learning about the character of leadership.
