Character based or behavior based leadership

On August 5th the Leadership Freak community generated a record number of comments when they answered the question, “What top three leadership qualities should every leader have?” Check out the post, “John Spence on life and leadership,” to review everyone’s comments.

Thanks to J.S. ‘Doc’ Campbell, C.P.H.Q., a featured contributor on Leadership Freak, for cataloging all 223 references to qualities/behaviors and creating a graph of the top 8 vote getters.

If you are having trouble reading the labels along the bottom of the graph, from left to right; character, communication, courage, empathy, humility, integrity, listening, and vision.

Your comments and the graph above are anecdotal not scientific.

You should notice character and integrity are top vote getters with 18 each. It looks to me like courage, empathy, humility, and integrity are character based. While communication, listening, and vision are behavior based.

If this is true, the Leadership Freak community clearly believes that leadership is founded in who you are not in what you do.

In addition, I believe, courage, empathy, humility, and integrity are all components of character. Furthermore, the top four vote-getting components of character are:

1. Integrity – 18

2. Empathy – 10

3. Courage – 8

4. Humility – 8

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Do you agree with the assessment I suggest that the Leadership Freak community believes leadership is character based?

Do you agree with the the top four components of character? If not, what are the top four components of character?