What drives the motivation for great leadership? Some of the best leaders are formed through adversity and have to experience failure before they are finally able to lead. The following video offers some famous failures.

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Snell specifically addresses this question of motivation by asking, “What moves great men?”

The Qualities of a Great Leader (cont.)

Consider American history and the remarkable bounty of leaders during the revolutionary era. A small, scattered, and often uneducated population produced an almost unbelievable crop of leaders. The historian Henry Steele Commager once remarked that if Florence was conducive to great art and Vienna to great music, the specialty of colonial Virginia was statesmanship. With a total population smaller than that of contemporary Delaware, Virginia nonetheless gave us Washington, Mason, Henry, Jefferson, Madison, and Marshall, and at the same time. How did this happen?

Commager lists several factors, especially the relatively limited opportunities for talent at the time. But at least some causation has to be given to the classical impetus for duty to the commonweal and a concern for the welfare of posterity. The concern for posterity involves both the sense of being remembered—fame—and the felt duty to benefit generations not yet born: “our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generations,” as Jefferson put it.

The historian Douglass Adair stresses the Founders’ desire for fame. Fame, he says, is “the action or behavior of a ‘great man,’ who stands out, who towers above his fellows in some spectacular way.” The desire for fame causes action; it pushes people to “reject the static complacent urge . . . to merely be and invites a strenuous effort to become.” The colonial leaders, he claims, sought fame, sought it above all else (clearly above money, about which they were famously careless), dedicating their efforts to the well-being of others, including their posterity—us.

The political scientist Robert Faulkner thinks this analysis is not quite right. He notes Lincoln’s great ambition of “being truly esteemed by my fellow man” and “rendering myself worthy of their esteem.” For Faulkner, the great leaders are ambitious—they desire to be in charge, to have their names in the papers, and to make a difference (power, reputation, and accomplishment)—and the greatest leaders are those with truly grand ambitions. But, he continues, Lincoln and others like him not only seek the good opinion of others—fame alone—but also wish to be worthy of that good opinion. Or, as Aristotle describes it, the good man doesn’t merely want honor; he wants honor as confirmation of his virtue.

America’s great statesmen, then, wished not only to win a name for themselves but also to be worthy of renown. This was not vainglory that welcomed all praise blindly; rather, as Faulkner puts it, they sought “intelligent honor, bestowed knowingly and deservingly.” In what Faulkner calls a “reasonable understanding of human excellence,” the leader wishes to earn true esteem and also to be recognized or counted as good.