This work may serve as an important input for the learners of leadership with action.

1. In pursuit to come out of devastating earthquake shake in Nepal Page 1
Leadership of Great Character
by
Chanakya P Rijal, PhD in Leadership
rijalcpr@gmail.com; +9779851105671
In the core, the overall act of successful leadership in all walks of life reflects some shared
characters, universally applicable in all contexts. This discussion encrypt has been prepared with
an aim to share a few of such specific features exhibited by the great leaders of deed.
First, an effective leader originates a marvelously shared-vision. Being able to turn big ideas into
executable plans while keeping own team on track is one of the most crucial acts of great
leadership. A great leader should first be able to map out the journey where to reach or drive the
organization to, and then clearly describe this vision to the rest of people and institutions having
concern over the institutional mission. It is quite important to listen to the internal members, rest
of people and institutions so as to make a shared feeling of institutional ownership by providing
with respectful space for their ideas while crafting the institutional direction. On top of it, the
leader must always stay a step ahead by anticipating and embracing change because the vision or
destiny is not a matter of chance but a strategic choice. At the same time, a shared vision is not
something limited to wish for, but to attain it, collectively. Measurement of leadership efficiency
will partly relay on how well a person envisions and empowers the concerned stakeholders in the
mission of attainment.
Second, a great leader must act with a great amount of shared-humility. The best way to act with
humility is to seek out feedback and keep focused on perceived needs of others concerned. For
this, an effective leader must be able to find a conscious time investment to make personal
reflection and observation on every trouble that the rest of people and institutions face. Similarly,
such a great leader would love to make a passion of admitting mistakes and also admit the areas
that need be improved. In this discourse, it is widely accepted that being open to criticism would
help greatly to achieve successful leadership attainment. A great leader embedded with the
character of humility would be more interested to take a little more share of blame than a share
of credit of the attainment, means that a good leader owns and failure for self and shares back the
credit of attainment with all concerned people and institutions involved in the institutional
mission.
Third, a great leader should possess high level of shared-self-awareness to better understand and
manage the emotions of own as well as that of others. For this, it requires a conscious control
over personal actions to impact positive outcomes, which could be achieved through an ‘inner-
calm and outer-resolve’ character of action down to earth. A good leader of character must be
able to understand how to handle the emotions that affect others. In fact, a successful life is
hardly an outcome of what happens to the beholder, and it is greatly a result of how the beholder
reacts to what happens. The more important aspect here is to create such awareness among the
fellow members too.
Fourth, shared-innovation is one of the powerful gears of leadership success in all endeavors. A
successful leader will not only come up with a series of innovative ideas, but also strive to
promote a culture of appreciating the innovative ideas of the fellow members engaged in the
respective mission. Such a practice will help promote total participation in the noble mission of
transformation.

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Fifth, maintaining and promoting personal, social and institutional shared-integrity is another
tool essential for crafting good to great leadership. A leader of great character should always
exhibit such a way that the rest of others should firmly find in him or her with strong values,
beliefs, ethics and sense of feeling as a good human being. Such a leader will always be
concerned to act with sincerity to build lasting trust and loyalty among all members. Acting with
proven honesty may positively help in assuring the rest of people about leader’s intentions. For
this, a leader of effective desire must have a passion of adhering with personal obligations to
guarantee the execution of moral principles and value systems within and beyond the
organizational operations. Setting an example is not ‘one of the major things’ but ‘only the thing’
for influencing others for positive pattern of actions.
Sixth, creating a shared-commitment is another equally important determinant of successful
leadership. A leader of proven character should be mostly motivated to first bring in action the
personal commitment and later strengthen it with a shared-commitment of the rest of people and
institutions concerned in the mission. Normally, people may have numerous innovative ideas but
most of them may not have enough idea and courage to execute them through self-initiative. In
this respect, an effective leader has to be tactful enough to figure out such symptoms and
transform them into reality. Having a shared commitment will help greatly in the process of
learning marvelously the ‘journey’ rather than being affixed with the ‘destination’ always. In
fact, such a practice will serve instrumental in facing the adversities of working and social life. A
leader with sound commitment will act with boldness to gain a shared commitment to execute
the innovative ideas. Such a leader should prove with hard and smart work and gaining shared-
loyalty of the fellow members of the noble mission.
Seventh, the great leaders mostly spend their lives by leading numerous initiatives for shared-
help to others with generosity and gratitude supported, conscious aim to influence positive
change in peoples’ lives impacting the humanity across the world – something similar to
‘servantship’. Such leaders mostly will take it as their pride to help other come out victorious in
their mission. It is a general phenomenon that the team success will partly rely on how it has
been supported by the person responsible to make such a team work. Good leaders will just value
for nurturing people for tangible actions, whereas the great leaders will act with nurturing
professionalism as well as personality in people whom they are providing leadership. But such a
work must be initiated with ‘selfless’ and ‘sinless’ feel of the leader for people in need of
development.
As it is firmly expected, this discourse would serve instrumental for all leadership practitioners
in different walks of practical life as well the learners of scientific inquiry in leadership.
However, there is a limitation of this work. Since it is an outcome of our personal learning about
the subject, it was hard to provide with relevant references to confirm the cognitive dimension of
this knowledge though a great amount of literature similar to it can be retrieved from various
sources. Among the various sources of learning about this discourse, different works of Stogdill,
Likert, Lewin, Warren, Drucker, Eisenhower, Schwitzer, Swindoll, Taylor, Maxwell, Bryan and
Luthans would serve instrumental to institutionalize such cognition.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Kathmandu,Nepal