Many corporate scandals involve CEOs and other top officers. Corporate America in these cases is missing one essential leadership ingredient—character.

Character is not just a manager’s psychological profile carried to an extreme. It is, to use an old phrase, doing the right things not just doing things right. To learn about character, young executives should, perhaps, go through self-awareness training, study, and, most importantly, experiential training with respect to character issues.

As plebes (underclassmen) in the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, “new” managers of men and women are taught eleven (11) principles of leadership from the Army’s manual, Principles of Leadership. These principles are summed up as follows:

(1) Know yourself and seek self-improvement
(2) Be technically and tactically proficient
(3) Seek responsibility, and take responsibility for your actions
(4) Make sound and timely decisions
(5) Set the example
(6) Know your subordinates and look out for their well-being
(7) Keep your subordinates informed
(8) Develop a sense of responsibility in your subordinates
(9) Ensure that the task is understood, supervised, and accomplished
(10) Train your personnel as a team
(11) Employ your wit (intelligence) in accordance with its capabilities.

Select a business leader (past or present). Do research on the leader’s managerial and leadership accomplishments. Match your chosen leader’s profile to the eleven principles listed above. Which of the eleven does he or she exhibit – or not exhibit.

Write a one page (300 word) paper describing how this leader does (or does not) meet these eleven principles.