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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 pretty shallow. Partly because it's not that easy to define leadership and partly because there are different. 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. 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 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. We know for example that conscientiousness, the personality trait, is a good predictor of long-term success 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 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. 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 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 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 the city. So there's an interesting idea there, which is that 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 Perrito 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 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 are 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 you'll be paralyzed, because there'll be, you know, 50% of you moving forward and 50% of you've frozen stiff, and that'll be enough just to lodge you in place. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]