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 Civic Virtue
Our problems and possibilities are too many and too complex for one human being to understand and address. Leadership in a republic demands something other than a “Lone Ranger” on a white horse.
Good solutions to complex societal problems are rarely quick. Until we lend more patience to understanding them and nurturing the relationships that allow us to act with consensus, we will stay captives to our current frustration.
A child of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson saw a future pregnant with human happiness as long as conscience and reason remained unfettered. America, of course, has not always lived up to Jefferson’s epitaph. This is one of those times.
What we need is less effort in pronouncing the other side wrong and more in questioning whether we are right. We need a dose of humility to calm the curse of certainty.
