We talk about crucibles and the critical role they play in shaping leaders. All our leaders, our youngest and our oldest, the geeks and the geezers, brought to their crucibles?or major challenges?four essential skills or competencies. These are the attributes that allow leaders to grow from their challenges, instead of being destroyed by them. In every case, the quality most responsible for their successful navigation of these formative experiences was their adaptive capacity?an almost magical ability to transcend adversity, with all its attendant stresses, and to emerge stronger than before. Every one of our leaders had three other essential qualities as well: the ability to engage others in shared meaning, a distinctive and compelling voice, and a sense of integrity (including a strong set of values).

The terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 seemed to call forth just that sort of greatness. Snatched out of harm’s way immediately after the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush did not get off to a distinguished start. "Where is the president?" people wondered, and understandably so. But in a matter of days a president with an uncertain mandate and a less-than-memorable oratorical style had found his voice. On Sept. 20, Bush gave a half-hour speech to Congress and the nation that approached greatness.

The fact that we repeatedly see our leadership model at work in the world bolsters our confidence in its validity. The president’s speech showed all four essential competencies of leadership: the adaptive capacity that allowed President Bush to turn even his usual verbal awkwardness into a strength, a newly found and compelling voice that allowed him to engage an entire nation and its allies through shared meaning and common purpose, and moral conviction gave his condemnation of the attacks the force of something more than political expediency.

How Not to Lead

Bad leadership can be every bit as instructive as good. We have talked about the four competencies of leadership. You can sometimes best see those qualities in their absence. Another reason for discussing bad leadership?failed leadership is a kinder term?is that there is so much of it.

Take M. Douglas Ivester of Coca-Cola. Inheriting the chairmanship on the sudden death of its esteemed, longtime CEO, Roberto Goizueta, Ivester lasted just 28 months. His grasp of context was woeful. Unlike his ethnically sensitive predecessor, Ivester failed to empathize with minority employees, so much so that he demoted the highest-ranked African-American even as the company was losing a $200 million class-action suit brought by black employees. This in Atlanta, a city with a powerful African-American majority.