The Top One Quality of True Leaders

“So, what's up with the pile of words?” you ask.

This is part of an experiment we conducted earlier this year on how to be the perfect leader.

Sooner or later, most of us wind up in a position of some power, whether it’s running a cub scout den or a girl scout troop, heading up a committee at church or your job, or residing over your flamenco dance group or your flamingo lawn ornament club. And when you nobly accepted the challenge of being in charge, your brain released a little shot of cortisol, the stress hormone. In your moment of panic, you made the executive decision to discover the secret to being a good leader.

If you were like me, you went down to your local bookstore and perused the aisles looking for books on leadership. After all, you wanted to be the best president the flamingo lawn ornament club had ever known, recognizing a club needs to be more than really swanky pink shirts.

In my case, the bookstore anticipated my arrival and had at the ready a slew of books on leadership, including some nice hardbound ones in the discount bin. (I guess that, like fish, visitors, and pop stars, leadership has a shelf life.) As I thumbed through the offerings, I detected a pattern: virtually every book included some list of desired attributes. Even the titles were less than subtle. The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader, Nine Qualities that Define Great Leaders––on and on. If you're into the whole brevity thing, Stephen Covey has honed the list down to seven.

Intrigued, I set out on a quest to find out the true number, a quest strikingly similar to my search for the one true champion of Philly cheese steak. Pretenders are everywhere. Pat’s, allegedly the birthplace of the dish, makes a convincing case for the crown––that is, unless you walk across the street to Geno's, which makes the same claim. And let’s not forget Tony Luke's, whose loyalists regularly bathe themselves in broccoli rabe out of devotion.

Of course, not everyone is so ambitious. In the tiny backwater town of Waconia where I live, Hoppers Bar loudly proclaims their status as the fourth best cheeseburger in Minnesota. The fourth best; they didn’t even medal. You gotta love that.

(The bar’s other claim to fame is the Belt Buster Burger challenge. If you can cram two double bacon cheeseburgers the size of hubcaps and a generous portion of fries into your body within an hour, you forgo the $20 cost of the meal. It is serious business. You’re banned from leaving your chair––probably not an issue after the weight of the first double bacon cheeseburger has slid down your gullet. You are also forbidden from claiming the prize more than once; a rule which suggests, chillingly, that someone completed the entire challenge, wiped the bacon grease from their lips, patted their distended belly and thought, “Hell, let’s do that again.”)

So what about those leadership attributes? Ultimately, I turned to Google for the answer. The word cloud you see represents all the various list of leadership traits I could find on line. The program stack-ranked the words, with the most common ones appearing in the largest type, and the rarer ones in a diminished typeface. So for example, while “honest” showed up on a ton of the lists, “motivated” barely made an appearance.

But the strange thing about all this was the realization that one attribute remained conspicuously absent: knowledge. How is it that leadership would not require knowledge as a central tenant? You would think it would be so large it would jump off the page and grab you by the throat. How could anyone make good decisions without knowledge? Guys like Aristotle and Plato would tell you that’s impossible.

“Now hang on,” you might say. “Wisdom made the list. It’s right there between ‘Communicator’ and ‘Courage.’” Not so fast, chief. Wisdom is defined as the accumulation of common sense. I’m not knocking it, but that’s different from knowledge, which is about specific expertise.

Professor K. Anders Ericsson’s studies show that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at anything––sports, music, gardening, flamingo watching, you name it. 2.75 hours a day, every day, for ten years and you’ve generated enough myelin wrap around your neural pathways to be truly knowledgeable.

The problem is clear: in this fast-paced world where shortcuts reign supreme, nobody wants to put in their time anymore to gain the knowledge and become the expert. We've reduced knowledge to the point it doesn't even show up in the bargain bin. It has apparently disappeared from our ideas about leadership.

From corporations to the government to MBA programs, knowledge has been discounted. We instead rely on transference, the dubious theory of “Hey, he was good at this, therefore he'll be good at that.” Michael Jordan comes to mind. Arguably one of the best basketball players of all time, he put in his 10,000 hours on the court, only to fall short when he tried his hand at professional baseball. (No expertise, no hits.)

It is shocking to think knowledge is no longer hinged to leadership. Leadership without knowledge is a boat without a rudder, a Philly cheese steak without cheese: it’s something else, but definitely not a cheese steak. Are we really willing to settle for that? Isn’t this country all about holding ourselves to the highest possible standard, aiming for the stars, and, always, always, reaching for the gold? Or, in the case of the latest Hoppers Belt Buster contender, that second double bacon cheeseburger.

Or, in the case of the same contender half an hour later, a pair of roomy sweatpants and a defibrillator.

Sweet dreams, little champ...