The Importance of Character in Leadership | Jordan Peterson

i've talked to lots of business people about leadership and there's a literature on leadership but it's not a good literature it's it's pretty shallow partly because it's not that easy to define leadership and partly because there are different you know people have different temperaments and different temperaments can be leaders they just do it in different ways now there's something in common about being a leader though and i would say one is that if you're an actual leader you actually know where you're going right because what are you going to do lead people in circles it's

like maybe they'll follow you but you're not a leader you're just a charlatan so you have to know where you're going and then you have to be able to communicate that and then people have to trust you so you actually have to be honest because people aren't that stupid at least not for a long period of time and then where you're going has to have some value because otherwise why would anyone want to go along with you and then you might say well what what are the attributes then that make you a leader and i

would say well they're characterological fundamentally and this is not naive optimism or casual moralizing it has nothing to do with that you know we know for example that conscientiousness the personality trait is a good predictor of long-term success in in most occupations not all but most and that one of the things that's associated with conscientiousness is that people keep their word they're trustworthy and that's certainly one element of a leader especially across any reasonable amount of time you have to be able to trust the person they can even be harsh right it doesn't matter because

you can see harsh leaders and kind leaders but as long as they do what they say they will do then you can follow them and you know that the future payoff is is secure something like that so the idea that characterological development is more important to leadership than being a firstborn that's a very crucial psychological realization that it's characterological development that makes you favored of god you know and i do think we've forgotten this in many ways because there isn't a lot of emphasis in our education system on characterological development and that's very very surprising

to me i think maybe it's partly because in our fractured society we can't agree on what constitutes a reasonable characterological goal so we just throw up our hands and don't educate our kids to any degree at all especially in schools about what an admirable person is like or even let them know that well maybe you should actually try to be one you know that that's actually the most important possible thing that you could learn right so and i also think and i think this is laid out very thoroughly in the biblical stories as well is

that if there are enough people who are admirable then things work and if there aren't then things things are terrible you get wiped out you remember when abraham is bargaining with god with regards to sodom and gomorrah he asks god to save the city if there's like 40 admirable people right respectable but let's say admirable right i don't want i don't want to say good because good is being corrupted in some sense by casual usage i mean admirable noble people right i think abraham bargains got down to like 10 if there's 10 of them in

the city the city won't be destroyed and that's not very many in a city so there's an interesting idea there which is that there there doesn't have to be that many people in a group who have their act together but zero is the wrong number and if it's zero then we're seriously in trouble and i think that goes along with the idea of the pareto principle in economics too which is that it's a small minority of people who do most of the productive work in any given domain so a small number of properly behaving people

might have enough of an impact to keep everything moving and that might actually be true but it can't fall below some crucial level and i do think that we're in some danger of allowing it to fall below some crucial level because our society seems to be at war in some ways against the idea of the individual and individual character per se and i think that's absolutely i think that's absolutely catastrophic that's part of the reason that i'm doing these biblical lectures i think that i've known for a long time that the moral presuppositions of a

culture are instantiated in its stories they're not instantiated in its explicit philosophy there might be a layer of explicit philosophy and of course there is in the west and a layer of explicit law but underneath that there are stories and there isn't anything under the stories except maybe behavior that's so implicit it doesn't even actually count it's not a cognitive operation and so these are the stories that are underneath our culture so there better be something to them that's what we hope but more importantly maybe we shouldn't toss them away without knowing what they mean

because if we toss them away then we're throwing everything that we depend on away as far as i can tell and we will pay for it we'll pay for it individually because we'll be weak you know because if you're not firm in your convictions then someone else who's firm in their convictions you're their puppet like instantly and then you're also the puppet of your own doubts right because unless you have convictions you're going to generate doubts like mad because everyone does and then the doubts will win and and you'll be paralyzed because they'll be you

know 50 of you moving forward and 50 of you frozen stiff and that'll be enough just to lodge you in place you