Defining Moments and the Formation of Leader Character: The Battlefield, the Boardroom, and Beacons of Hope
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Crises are defining moments for leaders that test their competencies, character, and commitment to their roles. These events shape individuals as leaders while providing opportunities to influence the future. If leaders aim to foster greater flourishing—encompassing security, prosperity, well-being, and justice—they must rely on their strength of character to envision and achieve it. Crises underscore that character is the foundation of effective leadership. Competencies and commitment—often the focus of leadership literature and executive education—cannot reach their full potential without character. This article examines the leadership of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during the Ukraine war. It explores how lessons from the battlefield and government can be applied to other sectors and highlights the importance of character in withstanding crisis. Additionally, this article discusses the use of intentional, directed practice as a tool to help leaders develop character, enabling them to navigate crises and emerge as stronger leaders who inspire hope and generate a better future.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".