Sep 19, 20192 min read

What Aristotle taught me about leadership

1. Nurture the virtues i.e. develop self-awareness and make decisions (choices) to act in alignment with your values.

2. Develop yourself to be able to excel in various types of situations over extended periods of time. I.e. seek to understand and build resilience.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence and quality are not acts, but habits”. (Aristotle)

Aristotle (382 BC – 322 BC) was a polymath who made fundamental contributions to diverse fields of study, including logic, rhetoric, ethics, physics, story, poetry, government, metaphysics, geology, zoology and philosophy.

According to Aristotle, to live well people should behave according to virtues that allow them to excel in many types of situations across time.

Each virtue relates to a vice, which can either exist in deficiency or excess. He believed that we should strive to live a life of moderation, nurturing the virtues within ourselves and avoiding the vices on either extreme.

Below are some examples of situations where the leader’s choice of behaviour indicates whether they are acting virtuously or not.

You can use the table to take a pulse check on your level of leadership virtuosity by highlighting your most common reactive leadership behaviour to each of the 9 listed situations.

1. DANGER

Cowardice - Vice of Deficiency

Courage - Virtue

Foolhardiness -Virtue of Excess

2. SATISFACTION OF APPETITES

Inhibition - Vice of Deficiency

Temperance - Virtue

Overindulgence - Virtue of Excess

3. GIVING GIFTS

Miserliness - Vice of Deficiency

Generosity - Virtue

Extravagance - Virtue of Excess