Aristotle called it eudaimonia – the idea of “flourishing” or “living well.”
That’s the goal for most of us, maybe even all of us. Who doesn’t want to live well?
For leaders in particular, eudaimonia isn’t just a goal but a tremendous challenge. Leadership comes with mountains of mental stress, long hours that also wear on you physically, and an ever-changing and unpredictable landscape full of land mines.
It’s not easy to flourish when you aren’t getting enough sleep, aren’t eating healthy meals, and aren’t exercising regularly, and it’s challenging to maintain those disciplines when you are in a fast-paced, high-level leadership role.
As you might expect, philosophers (like Aristotle) and theologians have offered plenty of advice throughout the ages on how to live well, but it’s typically directed at individuals. Teams and organizations, of course, are merely collections of individuals, so it makes sense that teams and organizations can flourish, as well.
When we talk about the health of teams and organizations, however, the discussions usually start and stop with values. But as theologian Paul Stevens pointed out, when Aristotle talked about the character traits that contribute to a flourishing life, he didn’t talk about values. He talked about virtues. So maybe it’s time we add virtues to the discussion for our teams, too.
“Many people, businesses, organizations, and even churches advertise their values, not their virtues,” Stevens wrote in Aging Matters. “Values are cherished ways of behaving, but they have no opposites. You have your values and I have mine. But virtues are ingrained character traits and they have opposites — vices.”
For Aristotle, there were intellectual virtues and moral virtues. His intellectual virtues were science (episteme), understanding (nous), wisdom (sophia), art (techne), and prudence (phronesis). But it was the moral virtues that he said played the biggest role in eudaimonia: courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, proper ambition, truthfulness, wit, friendliness, modesty, and righteous indignation.
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Others use different terms — fortitude for courage, for instance, or prudence for wisdom — and have other core virtues such as continence, patience, simplicity, humility, justice, temperance, faith, hope, and love.
Those last three are often referred to as uniquely theological virtues, and Stevens said they encompass all the classic virtues. Faith gives rise to wisdom, love gives rise to justice and temperance, hope gives rise to courage, and so on.
As leaders, we need cherished ways of behaving — for ourselves and for our organizations. So we need to define our values. But to really flourish, personally and corporately, then some critical character traits need to be ingrained into the soul of who we are. We need virtues. And we need to guard those virtues against their opposites — the vices that keep us from flourishing.
This leaves leaders with two mission-critical questions: What are our virtues? And what virtues to we aspire to hold and live?
Answering those questions, personally and for our teams, puts us on the path to it eudaimonia.
