Leadership That Matters

Chapter

FOUR

Charisma and Character

Power comes through cooperation, independence through service, and a greater self through selflessness.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 39¹

In Chapter Three, we described how various researchers, including ourselves, adopted Burns’ ideas about transformational leadership. The aim was to identify the behaviors associated with this new concept of leadership—an approach that raises leaders and followers to new levels of achievement and new heights of moral development.

We had some success in identifying such behaviors. However, we became concerned about this exclusive focus on leadership behaviors or, as training jargon now has it, “skillsets.” We remembered that researchers of the 1950s and ‘60s who studied leadership ...