What Makes Great Leaders - Max Rosochinsky

 What Makes Great Leaders - Max Rosochinsky

    According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, the definition of a leader is “a person in control of a group, country, or situation”. So what would make an exceptional leader? Before we can answer that, the definition of a leader first needs to be made less vague. For example, is a terrorist holding a group of civilians hostage a leader? You can argue that indeed they are, as they do exercise direct control over their hostages. However, this typically goes against our perception of a leader. To prevent this blog from becoming centered around what makes a great terrorist, I will introduce a set of rules. The first one is that the person in question must be a government or military official of some sort. The second one is that they must be generally liked by those they control (excluding Stockholm syndrome). The third one is that they must have some historical or significant event they overcame while they were a leader. It is worth noting that I am only discussing the strategies and the traits that these leaders showed, and don’t necessarily agree with their actions or implications in the world we know today. 

Abraham Lincoln is most often known as the savior of the Union. He led the nation in times of great strife and managed to maintain war support and the stability of his government, organized the shabby Union Army, and all the while fighting an opposing one  of one million men. Due to all of this, historians often rank Abraham Lincoln when comparing him to other U.S. presidents quite highly on the scale for most influential person in office (Villeneuve). However, his achievements were only half the story. Abraham Lincoln is often considered to be an honest man. One popular story reflecting this is that he once traveled miles to return change to a customer. His honesty also most likely helped him win the trust of the people in the dire circumstances. But benign honesty in itself didn’t make Abraham Lincoln. Think about it. In the opening battles of the civil war, the Union experienced loss after loss. Some people started questioning whether to fight the war at all. One less determined and with less integrity than Abe might have folded, but he didn’t. His choice led the Union to victory. Additionally, Abe wasn’t one to sit and watch the fighting going on outside his doorstep. He went out to soldiers under fire, expressing deep empathy for the wounded and boosting the morale of the troops. He was also known to have a relatively calm demeanor, and controlled his emotions. Abe didn’t simply act as Commander in Chief, but also as the therapist, visionary, and inspirationalist. What made Abraham Lincoln a great leader was the honesty he had towards his own people, the empathy he showed to his soldiers and men, his steadfast and unwavering determination to end the war in a Union victory and his coolheaded demeanor.

All these factors might make Abraham Lincoln arguably one of the greatest leaders in history, but there is another question I want to talk about: what makes a great leader in general? There is almost no doubt in my mind that there are people who were or are much greater leaders than Abraham Lincoln, even if put in his very same position simply based on the billions of people who have lived and died on this planet. In my opinion, a great leader is someone who listens to the people, makes unbiased decisions based on their actions and decisions, and is able to represent them. However, nobody can ever be perfectly represented, nor a leader perfectly loved, so a less high line needs to be reached. With that information, a great leader should still strive to make fair and unbiased choices based on his people's opinions. They should be able to be persuasive and honest. Additionally, they need to be empathetic yet also firm in their stances, rarely second guessing themselves and (almost always) putting the facts over the emotions which might result in them.

To summarize this blog, it is relatively hard to become a great leader. You need to be beloved by your people, which rarely is the case in democratic systems by the vast majority, you need to be empathetic, which might often get impeded by politics, and you need to be honest, which also has a chance to fall victim to the nature of politics. Abraham Lincoln was an exception, and managed to fulfill most of these rules to a pretty satisfactory degree. He was a great speaker, organizer, and leader, but yet he still got assassinated by one of the very people he was chosen to represent. There have not been nearly enough people have been given the opportunity to lead a country as necessary to achieve one that is perfect. Which leads us to the question, is any one person truly great? That is for you to decide, but in this blog I will say no. We know “great” leaders mostly for their influence on history and what they did, but rarely so by what they were actually like.

- Max Rosochinsky

Works Cited:

Villeneuve, Andrew. "NPI's founder ranks the presidents, 2025 edition." The

     Cascadia Advocate, 17 Feb. 2025, www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2025/02/

     npis-founder-ranks-the-presidents-2025-edition.html. Accessed 9 Dec. 2025.