It appears that I have a different understanding of leadership than a large portion of the country. My former employers spent a lot of money making leadership training available to us.

A real leader would let their actions lead.

A real leader is willing to put in the effort to learn a much as possible in order to be able to make an informed decision.

“If leaders are just, people will not dare to be intractable.”“Book: The Wisdom of Confucius” by John Drake Flickr is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

A real leader knows when expertise is needed, and where they need to listen to both the information from experts and their own values.

A real leader knows that hands on experience beats that person you trust with a book they bought.

A real leader finds a solution, and works on it until other people notice and join in.

A real leader rises on the merits of their abilities.

A real leader understands that shortcuts are always available, but they bypass learning the skills they’ll need to depend on.

Leadership is being worth following.

Power can be seized by the unjust.

Injustice expects obedience, and believe that their ideas will succeed because everyone will obey them. Bad ideas applied by force are disasters.

How good of you, I said; but I should like to know also whether injustice, having this tendency to arouse hatred, wherever existing, among slaves or among freemen, will not make them hate one another and set them at variance and render them incapable of common action?

Certainly.

And even if injustice be found in two only, will they not quarrel and fight, and become enemies to one another and to the just?

They will.

And suppose injustice abiding in a single person, would your wisdom say that she loses or that she retains her natural power?

Let us assume that she retains her power.

Yet is not the power which injustice exercises of such a nature that wherever she takes up her abode, whether in a city, in an army, in a family, or in any other body, that body is, to begin with, rendered incapable of united action by reason of sedition and distraction; and does it not become its own enemy and at variance with all that opposes it, and with the just? Is not this the case?

Yes, certainly.

And is not injustice equally fatal when existing in a single person; in the first place rendering him incapable of action because he is not at unity with himself, and in the second place making him an enemy to himself and the just? Is not that true, Thrasymachus?

Yes.

-- Plato’s Republic