Better Evaluations, Better Representatives

Guest Opinion

By Bill Steeves | July 18, 2026

If elected representatives provide entrusted leadership to our nation and constituents, maybe we should evaluate them as leaders, not politicians or legislators. Using selected leadership criteria to evaluate representatives, incumbent or fledging, could help determine their qualifications and worthiness for elected office.

Fundamentally, leaders pursue missions, representatives follow their sworn oaths, no human grouping produces smarter or better leaders, and we voters can elect and reject those in or vying for office. Assess them objectively from leadership’s complex evaluative elements.

Gregory Nazianzen, circa 362 CE, described leading as “guiding,” a leader’s resources as “the art of arts and science of sciences,” and humans as “the most variable and manifold of creatures.” Nazianzen highlighted, not defined, leadership’s complexities, indicating leaders need to know themselves and those they lead to enable appropriate use of resources.

Hundreds exist, but no single definition fits leadership. The French Foreign Legion describes its leadership style and leadership,s complexities aptly in one word, “Mystique.” Arousing curiosity and encouraging discovery, Mystique implies a leader’s knowledge of self and others, acumen to estimate situations accurately, and ability to initiate the correct course of action with the proper resources.

The time-tested U.S. Marine Corps Leadership Principles and Traits provide important evaluation criteria. Adapt them, they are appropriate to all professions. You can review and consider them for leader assessments online. One link is military, the other reflects program management. (44riskpm.com/blog/leadership-principles and tecom.marines.mil/Portals/90/HQBN/Directives/Leadership/Leadership%20Traits%20and%20Principles.pdf.)

Connecting scholarship and education to leadership principles and traits is vital. Because, if “Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance,” per William Gaddis, its antidote is scholarship. For a nation, Peter Brougham said, “Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.” John F. Kennedy was emphatic: “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”

Dr. Ernest Boyer in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professorate, identified four academic functions he called Scholarships. There is Discovery, acquiring knowledge through research; Integration, connecting facts across disciplines; Application, applying useful information; and Teaching, merging all factors to instruct and learn interactively to enable practical application. Boyer’s Scholarships should be incorporated with leadership to become every leader's asset.

Discovery, to the late management guru Peter Drucker, meant intellectual integrity, objectivity, and uncovering facts to determine truth. Max Hastings’ WWII research, presented in The Secret War concluded, “democracies handled intelligence better than the dictatorships . . . because they understood the merit of truth, objective assessment of evidence, not as a virtue, but as a weapon of war.”

Integration considers alternatives. Drucker believed effective decisions are judgments based on diverging views, not consensus. Much like the aphorism, “It is not the risk to a critic, it is the risk to an organization or a society if there are no critics,” Alfred Sloan, former General Motors CEO, pushed for other viewpoints. After reaching complete agreement, he halted discussion and forced thought by directing staff to take time to find opposing views to better understand the agreement.

Application avoids inattentiveness to history and trends, and means expanding and updating capabilities within a profession. General S. L. A. Marshall in The Officer as a Leader said one’s depth of thought comes from intensive continuous study, consulting with academics and experts to determine which works most engaged their thinking, and then read them. To Ash Carter, “The dominant mental methodology of real policymakers is historical reasoning.” President Harry Truman said, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”

Teaching is a key leadership competency because leaders instruct, inform, and train those they lead. Competent instruction uses systems thinking to create understanding how components function separately and collectively. Leaders cannot allow themselves, individuals, and units to be outsmarted by rivals, or overtaken by market forces or neglect. General Marshall said instructors should study harder than students, prepare beyond content being taught, and think deeply. (A caveat: there are no dull subjects, only dull instructors.)

From leadership’s traits, principles, and scholarships, evaluation criteria from one or more categories appropriate to each representative can be selected. Traits identify individual qualities, behaviors, words, and actions that highlight a person’s character. Principles, applied or ignored, demonstrate the positive and negative results of a leader’s functional obligations to achieve goals. And scholarship’s assets will determine if a leader used them or not to build knowledge, analyze data, and determine truth to serve their country and constituents and follow their sworn oaths.

Selecting people for elected office evaluated as leaders just might improve government.

From Bridgeport, CT, Bill Steeves, Ed.D., is a retired U.S. Marine (1954-1974) and educator in academe and industry.