Becoming a Leader of Character: 6 Habits That Make or Break a Leader at Work and at Home - Softcover

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General James L Anderson, PhD. After graduating from West Point, General Jim Anderson spent a total of 41 years leading soldiers in the United States Army. His served twenty-four years at Master of the Sword as the Head of the Physical Education Department developing our nation’s future Army officer corps. He was an Army Ranger School instructor, and a veteran of two tours in combat in Vietnam earning a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars for Valor, and a Purple Heart while leading soldiers in combat. He is the best selling author of The West Point Fitness and Diet Book and The Competitive Edge along with hundreds of journal articles and TV and radio guest appearances. Dave Anderson Dave graduated from West Point and served as a field artillery forward observer during Operation Desert Storm. He earned a Bronze Star while leading soldiers in combat. After the Army, Dave joined a Fortune 50 company where he spent twenty years in sales and various sales leadership positions winning multiple sales and leadership awards. He now owns Anderson Leadership Solutions as a leadership speaker and consulting expert. He hosts a syndicated leadership talk radio show (IMPACT Talk Radio) and has written over 400 leadership articles posted on his website www.andersonleadershipsolutions.com.

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There is a crisis of leadership in the world today. That may not be news to you. All you have to do is read a newspaper, watch the nightly news, or scan the Internet to see that the lack of good leadership is one of the central problems in our world.

Yet, books on leadership abound. So why this book? Why another book on leadership? Our reason is this: the book you hold in your hands is a different type of leadership book. We have read many of the books that are out there on leadership and watched as the crisis in leadership in all parts of our culture has continued to grow. We realize that plenty of people are devoting themselves to stopping this deterioration in leadership. They have written books and produced leadership seminars, claiming to have the answers for changing leaders. These books and seminars cover management techniques, personality traits, building trust, building teams, and improving coaching for performance. These approaches are not bad, but we believe they miss the root cause of the issue. We believe the majority of the leadership offerings available are treating the symptoms of the leadership crisis and not the underlying disease. Our book is here to help all of us who are motivated and ready to treat that disease.

We Have a Sick Patient—and the Patient Is Not Getting Better

Most of the leadership books and seminars available are synonymous to giving the patient Robitussin® to control a cough. That is not a bad idea in and of itself. We can even argue which cough medicine may work best at controlling the cough. But the issue we face is not really the cough. What we are dealing with is PNEUMONIA! The Robitussin® may help control the cough in the short-term, but the patient is not going to get better.

Corporations spend $50 billion a year on leadership training and development and that number continues to grow. There are more leadership books than ever available for any aspiring or current leader to read. But leaders are not getting better. In a survey of over 14,000 leaders and HR professionals conducted every two years since 2009, Development Dimensions International (DDI) found that the effectiveness of leaders in business has not improved from 2009 to 2015. In fact, despite the increase in spending on leadership development, only 1 in 3 people believe they received value from the leadership training they got at work. Plus, only 15 percent of leaders in the survey rated their company’s leadership bench strength as “high” in 2015. Even that was a decline from 18 percent in 2011.

The results are in: What we are doing to develop leaders is not working! We are treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Let’s stop treating a pneumonia patient with cough medicine! Let’s treat the underlying cause of the cough and the other symptoms that go with this disease.

In leadership, the symptoms may be trust, poor communication, goal setting, employee turnover, coaching skills, or dysfunctional teams. But the underlying disease, the main issue that does not get adequately addressed, is CHARACTER. We are practicing leadership and developing leaders without an adequate consideration for character. To change our own results and to change the results of leadership development books and seminars, character must be at the foundation of every effort, or else we will keep missing the underlying cause of 90 percent of all our leadership woes.

We believe that the Habits of Character that determine your strength of character as well as ours flow from two critical habits: courage and humility. Without courage and humility, the other critical habits we unpack in this book—integrity, duty, selflessness, and positivity—will continue to be well-meaning platitudes instead of character-changing behaviors.

Simple Truths Simply Presented

If you are like most leaders, you are overwhelmed with the demands of work and home life. We are not delusional and believe you have hours upon hours to wade through an academic treatise on leadership. So we did not write one. This book is designed so you can read a chapter and put it down. There is a free online character assessment available at ( URL) so you can evaluate which chapters you want to dig into and which ones you can read once and move forward. Or, you can read our book straight through on a long weekend and then return to the chapters you want to dwell in. We also have reflective questions for you to contemplate at the beginning of each chapter to help you focus on the topic at hand; you could spend a short time or a long time ruminating over those. Whatever works for you!