For some, leadership is just an attitude. The one who walks in the room and takes charge becomes the leader.  But is leadership just bravado? Consider the following video in which Cameron Anderson from the Cal Berkeley Haas School of Business discusses a relevant research study.

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Snell concludes his article with the following discussion on how one can acquire leadership qualities.

The Qualities of a Great Leader (cont.)

This is an interesting combination: a passionate desire for esteem, a passion that motivates leaders to undertake difficult and grand tasks and see them through, but in a reasonable and excellent way. How does one become such a person?

Here the venerable tradition of the liberal arts—the free arts—has something to offer, if properly understood. Too often we think of the liberal arts as existing to form minds or intellects alone, or even to provide “skills” for the worker. But the real measure of an education is not the extent of our intellect but the responsible exercise of our freedom.

Moreover, the responsible exercise of freedom is not attained by formal rationalism. While we may wish it so, reading about virtue does not create virtue. As C. S. Lewis explained, “I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat,’ than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.” Or, as Plato articulated so well in the Republic, the first duty of education is the formation of good opinion regarding pleasures and pains, things delightful and shameful. Taste is prior to understanding, and we generally bother to understand only those things we already love.

In the Republic, the future philosophers are trained to value and honor nobility as a precondition for the right use of reason, for often the blindness or sophisticated confusion of reason can be safely guided by moral imagination, by noble and just sentiments or emotions. In a helpful image, Lewis describes reason’s need of emotion as the “head rul[ing] the belly through the chest.”

As Faulkner describes it, reasonable ambition includes a desire to be worthy of great things, and while accomplishment requires skill and art, it also requires nobility of character and desire. One must have a keen and discriminating sense of those things that are fine and honorable, and a sharp dislike of baseness. Such ambition requires a noble soul, or magnanimity.

Leaders need to be magnanimous—big-souled people who reach out for grand things, but who reach out for them in noble ways. Men and women who know and will and choose and labor for the highest and most noble things.

We need leaders like that. As you learn leadership, raise your vision; don’t let fear drag you into desiring success alone. Instead, pursue human excellence in its fullest form. And look for help where it may be found, in the wisdom and tradition and knowledge of the past, the lamp of experience, which the best of the liberal arts can offer. Seek fame and honor, certainly, but seek more to be worthy of them.