As I’ve mentioned before, I’m reading Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield, and as Alexander was one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known, I’ve been thinking a lot about the qualities of a great leader. Great leadership certainly requires many of the personal qualiites that Alexander possessed: bravery, self-confidence, generosity, passion, mercy, vision, and honor.

Great leadership, though, has as much (if not more) to do with the quality of people you lead as with any of these personal qualities. If the people Alexander surrounded himself with can serve as an indicator, the right people for your company, both for startups and large corporations, is a combination of three virtues, listed in order of importance:

1. Trust. Can you trust the person? If you cannot trust the people around you, then you are not able to focus on your job at hand, and you will never create a successful company or product.
2. Passionate persistence. I’ve blogged on this before; passionate persistence is a combination of cardia, “heart”, and dynamis, “the will to fight”. In modern terms, this combination creates someone who is passionate about succeeding at what they do. They may not be the most skilled, but they will get the job done better than any other.
3. Skill. having the right skillset is a no-brainer, but is probably the least important of the three virtues. You can train someone to do a job, but you cannot change a person’s character or instill a sense of passion.

And then, once you have the right people in place,

1. Let them do their jobs. Micromanagement on any level kills passion. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t set performance expectations, but once those expectations are set, respect the boundaries, and let the person do their job.

2. Solve personnel problems quickly. Every leaders run into problems with their employees—even their best employees. In his book, *How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Carnegie details 9 principles for inspiring change in others. They are:

   1. If you must find fault, begin with praise and honesty
   2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly
   3. Talk about your own mistakes first
   4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders
   5. Let the other person save face
   6. Praise the slightest improvement and every improvement
   7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to
   8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct
   9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest

I’m certainly no expert on leadership—merely a student of great leaders. My thoughts, here are nothing new, but I do think they are powerful enough and important enough to warrant re-stating here.