Leaders need to demonstrate empathy. With it, trust grows and society can improve. Without empathy, leadership is hollow. and often fruitless.
Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. His work focuses on values-based leadership, ethics, and decision making. A former Air Force officer, Terry also previously served as Director of the Horace Mann Learning Center, the training arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and as Dean of Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. Terry is co-editor and author of The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships That Make Government Work (CQ Press, 2011). He also wrote Statesmanship, Character and Leadership in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government (Loftlands Press 2015).
All in Character
Leaders need to demonstrate empathy. With it, trust grows and society can improve. Without empathy, leadership is hollow. and often fruitless.
Stubbornness can cause trouble or come in handy. It depends on what you decide to be hard-headed about and how you do so.
Saying “I was wrong” opens the door to personal learning, healing, and better relationships - for individuals and leaders.
Military leaders often need to ask those under their command to sacrifice their lives. To get that kind of commitment, they must love those they lead.
Candidates who promise to much and ask too little of us warp the political process and the American character.
When we allow leaders to avoid responsibility for their actions, we destroy the trust on which a healthy society depends.
Regrets are not detours from living life "my way" but paving stones for it. They shape us. They are signals about who we should be.
We need cures for student loan debt that do not produce unintended side effects that warp society and the character of the students they are designed to help.
The climb up the leadership ladder is often slow and and arduous. The fall is much faster. Those who have made it to the top can stay there, but only if their realize the dangers on the uppermost rung.
Because we’re good people, we sometimes permit ourselves to do things that are not so good. Knowing why can help us be better when we want to be.
On Independence Day, we should recall our founders, who took the hard way against the world's greatest power. The longer we take the easy way, the steeper the price we pay to address our nation’s problems..
Current immigration policy is a failure of elected officials. It divides us from each other, increases distrust of the law and pulls Americans away from their compassionate instincts.
Whenever the military is asked to serve political purposes, as it was recently in Japan, it threatens our Constitution.
In science and technology, the balance between humility and hubris is hard to judge. Much of that work goes on out of view and most of us lack the knowledge to evaluate – or even understand – the work itself.
If legality is the sole standard incumbent on a president, we risk a presidential playing field devoid of ethical expectations.
The desire to be in the inner circle of a powerful person or group, to be one of the “chosen,” can lead a person to be morally blind to what they are asked to do.
We want strong leaders but mistake humility for weakness. Strength is not opposed to humility, it is magnified by it.
Sam Newell sold appliances, retail. No government bailout would be there for him. He had to succeed on his own – and did - with five bedrock and ethical principles.
Texts, tweets, and emails are ubiquitous. But as technology, they are value-neutral. The values they reflect come from us.
The Senate confirmation process through which we recently passed was a test of our American experiment. In regard to the character of the nominee, the President, the Senate, and many of the people themselves, America failed the test.