Abstract:

Since the growth of positive psychology in 21st century, character strengths present one of the main trends in personal development in many areas including education. Findings on strengths related to effective leadership create a basis for newly emerging concept of leading people, referred to as character-based leadership. This approach also has a potential of contributing to ongoing discussion on competencies important for modern-day education professionals.

There are studies examining the character strengths in various contexts in education. However, only a small percentage of them directly focuses on teachers as leaders. Due to their high physical and mental demands and exposition of groups to extreme conditions, one of the environments mostly utilized for the development and application of new leadership theories are the armed forces. From the methodological perspective, existing research of character-based leadership in military draws mainly on quantitative studies using questionnaires and partly on qualitative studies applying open-ended questions and interviews. However, there are other sources of information relevant to this topic, which are currently underused.

This paper focuses on valuable character strengths of a leader as reflected in two specific sources: insignias of special forces units from different countries and written memoirs of authors with authentic war experience. Its aim is to analyse the selected traditions and literature and summarize the outcomes in a structured overview. The first chapter defines the term “character-based leadership” as understood in this paper and describes its role for special forces. Next, it presents the mottos of SAS, Navy SEALs, Green Berrets, Rangers, KSK, Jægerkorpset, GROM, and other units, and discusses which strengths they refer to. The second chapter summarizes notes on selected strengths of a leader, which are frequently commented by soldiers with front-line combat experience. These strengths are consciousness, honesty, justice, decisiveness, teamwork, sociability, and self-development. Where relevant, the text is complemented by results of studies, which further demonstrate the importance of given strengths.

The paper extends the current state of knowledge about character-based leadership with findings from less utilized sources. It also provides an inspiration for more complex future research on this topic in terms of methodology. Considering that findings from military environment are usually transferred to other areas of life, the paper may bring an inspiration to teachers interested in personal and leadership development, too.

Keywords:

Character strengths, leadership development, military traditions, authentic reflection.