Ethical Leadership in the 21st Century by
H. Norman Schwarzkopf
Former Commander
U.S. Central CommanderGeneral H. Norman Schwarzkopf served two combat tours in Vietnam and was task force deputy commander during the Grenada student rescue operation. He is best know, however, for his service during the Gulf War as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command and commander of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. In 1991, he retired from the military and began work on his bestselling autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero.
He serves on the board of governors of the Nature Conservancy and is the national spokesman for the Recovery of the Grizzly Bear. Additionally, he is chairman of the STAR BRIGHT Capital Campaign for pediatric pain reduction research; the co-founder of the Boggy Creek Gang, a camp for children with chronic illness; the national spokesman for prostate cancer awareness; one of the organizers of the Miami Project for the Cure of Paralysis; a trustee of the University of Richmond; and a board director of a number of global business concerns.
He earned his B.S. from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1956 and his M.S. in Missile Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1964.
In these excerpts from his keynote address at the Shavano Institute for National Leadership fifteenth anniversary program, retired U.S. Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf identifies character as the most important attribute of successful leaders. Leaders not only take charge, but they "do the right thing" and hold themselves to a higher set of standards and values.
The main ingredient of good leadership is good character. This is because leadership involves conduct, and conduct is determined by values. You may call these values by many names. "Ethics," "morality," and "integrity" come to mind. But this much is clear: Values are what make us who we are.
You and I - every one of us - are walking, talking repositories of values that express our ideas about the world, about right and wrong, and about the nature of our existence.
In the aftermath of the last two presidential elections, many media experts claim that "character is no longer an issue." But Americans do want their leaders to exhibit good character. The trouble is, they feel that what they want and what they will probably end up with are two very different things. They have been disillusioned by political scandals, bureaucracy, and overregulation.
In a recent national poll, 75 percent of all respondents said it was okay for them to lie to their leaders and that they indeed lie to their leaders regularly. Why? Because their leaders are lying to them.
Without good character, we live in a frightening amoral world.
The True Rewards
The true rewards of leadership come from striving to live up to a higher moral standard, from trying to do the right thing. Some people get into the "leadership game" for the next tangible reward - the next promotion, the next pay raise, the next headline. But these individuals are inevitably doomed to disappointment. At the end of the day, they cannot point to these things and say that they are the stuff of which genuine happiness and pride are made.
Good leaders sometimes - in fact, quite often - lose in the material world. They go right ahead anyway, knowing that they are going to lose. Are they tilting at windmills? Do they have a "can't do" instead of a "can do" attitude? Of course not. They are committed to defending the right values. And the right values are seldom safe, easy, or advantageous.
"Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly journal of Hillsdale College."
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