apply-five-commander-virtues

Apply Five Commander Virtues

Assess a leader — or yourself — against the five virtues Sun Tzu identifies as essential for strategic command: wisdom (智), sincerity (信), benevolence (仁), courage (勇), and strictness (严). Identify which virtue deficits are causing failures; develop the deficient virtues deliberately.

Why This Is Best Practice

Origin: Chapter 1 of The Art of War lists the commander (将) as the fourth of the five strategic factors, and defines the commander's quality through five virtues: "The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage and strictness." (智、信、仁、勇、严, Ch.1, Giles trans.) These are not personality traits — they are functional capabilities whose presence enables strategic execution and whose absence produces specific, predictable failure modes.

Adopted by: The five virtues map directly to frameworks validated by modern leadership research. Jim Collins' Level 5 Leadership in Good to Great (2001) identifies personal humility (仁) combined with professional will (勇+严) as the defining quality of leaders who produced sustained company excellence — consistent with Sun Tzu's pairing. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety (The Fearless Organization, 2018) demonstrates that 信 (sincerity/trustworthiness) is the prerequisite for team performance under uncertainty. Robert Greenleaf's servant leadership (1977) is a modern elaboration of 仁 as a leadership principle.

Impact: Leadership failure modes are predictable. A leader high on 勇 (courage) but low on 智 (wisdom) makes bold decisions without adequate judgment — recklessness. A leader high on 仁 (benevolence) but low on 严 (strictness) creates a warm culture with poor execution discipline — the "nice but ineffective" leader. A leader low on 信 (sincerity) produces a team that hedges, withholds information, and does not commit. Diagnosing which virtue is deficient explains the specific failure mode and points to the corrective action.

Why best: Most leadership assessment frameworks are descriptive (personality types, behavioural styles) rather than functional. The five commander virtues framework is functional — each virtue enables a specific capability that strategic execution requires, and the absence of each virtue produces a specific, identifiable failure mode. This makes it actionable for diagnosis, hiring, and development.

Sources: Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Giles trans. 1910) — Ch.1 (Laying Plans); Collins, Good to Great (2001) — Level 5 Leadership; Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (2018) — psychological safety; Greenleaf, Servant Leadership (1977); Drucker, The Effective Executive (1967) — executive effectiveness

Steps

Step 1: Understand what each virtue enables

智 (Zhì) — Wisdom / Judgment The ability to assess situations accurately, anticipate consequences, and make sound decisions under uncertainty. Not intelligence alone — wisdom is experience-informed judgment applied to novel situations.

Enables: Strategic assessment, adaptive decision-making, distinguishing important from urgent, reading the competitive environment accurately. Deficit produces: Poor situational assessment, decisions that ignore critical factors, inability to adapt when circumstances change, overconfidence in a single analytical framework.

信 (Xìn) — Sincerity / Integrity / Trustworthiness Doing what you say; keeping commitments to the people you lead; consistency between stated values and actual decisions. Integrity in the broadest sense — not just honesty, but coherence between words and actions.

Enables: Team trust, psychological safety, honest information flow upward, organisational alignment behind stated priorities. Deficit produces: Teams that withhold bad news, decisions driven by what the leader wants to hear rather than what is true, commitment without follow-through, erosion of organisational credibility.

仁 (Rén) — Benevolence / Care / Servant Leadership Genuine concern for the welfare of the people you lead. Not weakness or permissiveness — 仁 and 严 must coexist. Care that motivates the team to extend beyond job-description compliance into committed effort.

Enables: Discretionary effort, retention of excellent people, willingness to surface problems before they become crises, team resilience under adversity. Deficit produces: Mercenary culture (people stay for compensation, not commitment), high attrition when conditions are difficult, information hoarding, and minimalist compliance with directives.

勇 (Yǒng) — Courage / Decisiveness Making difficult decisions at the right moment without hesitation. Not recklessness (which is 勇 without 智) — courage tempered by judgment. The willingness to take necessary actions despite uncertainty, discomfort, or personal risk.

Enables: Decisive action at critical moments, willingness to make unpopular calls (difficult feedback, hard personnel decisions, strategic pivots), ability to commit rather than deliberate past the point of decision. Deficit produces: Decisions deferred past the optimal moment, consensus-seeking that produces slow and diluted actions, avoidance of necessary conflict, failure to act on known problems.

严 (Yán) — Strictness / Discipline / Standards Enforcing standards consistently, without favoritism, for every member of the team. Clear expectations, consistent accountability, and the refusal to accept excuses for avoidable performance failures.

Enables: Execution consistency, organisational reliability, a culture where accountability is real, quality standards that hold under pressure. Deficit produces: Execution inconsistency, a two-tier culture (favorites vs. others), declining standards over time, a team that does not take commitments seriously because consequences are not consistently applied.

Step 2: Score the leader across all five virtues

Rate the leader (or yourself) on each virtue using observable behaviours, not intentions:

Virtue	Score 1–5	Key observable behaviour
智 Wisdom		Do their assessments of situations prove accurate over time?
信 Sincerity		Do their commitments to the team consistently hold?
仁 Benevolence		Do team members voluntarily go beyond their job description?
勇 Courage		Do they make hard decisions when needed, without prolonged delay?
严 Strictness		Are standards applied consistently, regardless of who is involved?

Score based on what you observe, not what the leader says about themselves. The virtues are revealed by behaviour under pressure, not by self-report.

Step 3: Diagnose failure modes from virtue deficits

Map observed failures to specific virtue deficits:

Observed failure	Primary virtue deficit
Team withholds bad news until it's a crisis	信 — trust deficit; team does not believe honesty is safe
Bold moves that consistently miss critical factors	勇 without 智 — recklessness (also listed in five commander faults)
Warm culture, poor execution, missed commitments	仁 without 严 — care without discipline
Decisions never finalised, consensus-seeking	勇 deficit — courage to decide is absent
Standards fall when the leader's favourites are involved	严 deficit — inconsistent accountability
Strategic assessment proves wrong repeatedly	智 deficit — poor situational judgment
People leave despite competitive compensation	仁 deficit — team does not feel seen or valued

Use this table to move from "something is wrong with the leadership" to "this specific virtue deficit is producing this specific failure."

Step 4: Develop deficient virtues deliberately

Virtues are not fixed personality traits — they are capabilities that can be built with the right practice:

Developing 智 (Wisdom):

• Build a habit of pre-decision fact-finding: before deciding, write down the key assumptions you are making and assess how confident you are in each
• After major decisions, do a structured review: what did you get right? What did you miss? What would you assess differently?
• Seek out people who think differently and give them permission to challenge your assessments

Developing 信 (Sincerity):

• Track every commitment you make to your team; review weekly whether you delivered
• When you cannot deliver on a commitment, communicate proactively and before the deadline
• Say no to requests you cannot honour; do not create commitments you do not intend to keep

Developing 仁 (Benevolence):

• Hold regular 1:1 conversations focused on the other person's development and wellbeing, not project status
• Learn what each team member values outside of their job performance
• Advocate visibly for your team's interests in decisions that affect them

Developing 勇 (Courage):

• Set a maximum decision cycle time: beyond this time limit, decide with the information available rather than waiting for certainty
• Identify one decision you have been avoiding; make it this week
• Practice delivering difficult feedback — start with lower-stakes situations to build the capacity

Developing 严 (Strictness):

• Define explicit, observable standards for each key role before performance is evaluated
• Apply consequences consistently regardless of the individual's seniority, tenure, or personal relationship with you
• Address standard violations the first time they occur; do not accumulate a pattern before acting

Step 5: Apply to hiring — assess candidates against all five virtues

When hiring for leadership positions, design the interview to produce evidence for each virtue:

Virtue	Interview question type
智	"Tell me about a situation where your initial assessment of a market/problem proved wrong. What did you learn?"
信	"Describe a commitment you made to your team that you failed to keep. How did you handle it?"
仁	"What do you know about each of your direct reports that has nothing to do with their job performance?"
勇	"Tell me about a decision you made that was unpopular. How did you make it? What happened?"
严	"Describe a situation where a high performer was not meeting a standard. What did you do?"

Score each answer: does it demonstrate the virtue through observable behaviour, or does it describe the virtue abstractly without evidence?

Rules

• Score based on observed behaviour, not stated intentions. Leaders who espouse sincerity but do not keep commitments score low on 信 regardless of what they say.
• All five virtues must be present at adequate levels. A 5 on 仁 does not compensate for a 1 on 严. The virtues are not interchangeable.
• The five virtues and the five commander faults interact. 勇 without 智 produces the recklessness fault; 仁 without 严 produces the excessive-care-for-followers fault. Read both frameworks together.
• Develop virtues through behaviour change, not self-awareness. Knowing you lack 勇 does not produce 勇. Identifying specific decisions to make and making them does.
• Apply the framework to yourself first. Leaders who assess others without self-assessment produce assessments that are accurate about others and blind about themselves.

Examples

Diagnosing a team's information problem (信 deficit): A leadership team notices that problems consistently surface late — as crises, not early warnings. Root cause diagnosis: the leader has responded to bad news historically with blame or visible displeasure, eroding 信. The team has learned that withholding is safer than surfacing. Corrective action: the leader explicitly rewards early problem surfacing in three consecutive team meetings, changes their own visible response to bad news, and over 6–12 months rebuilds the 信 that allows honest upward communication.

Hiring for a VP of Engineering role: Interview reveals: strong 智 (excellent situational judgment in technical architecture), adequate 勇 (has made hard calls on failed projects), strong 仁 (detailed knowledge of team members' career aspirations). But: inconsistent 严 — stories about standards enforcement involve making exceptions for high performers who were personal friends. Risk: will build a warm, technically strong team with a two-tier accountability culture. If 严 deficit is acceptable given the stage (early startup, speed over process), hire with awareness. If execution discipline is critical at current scale, continue searching.

Common Mistakes

Assessing virtues from self-report: "I'm a very direct leader" (self-assessed 严) tells you nothing. Ask for specific examples with outcomes, then verify with references.

Treating the virtues as a personality model: The virtues are functional capabilities, not personality types. An introvert can have high 勇; an extrovert can have low 信. Avoid mapping virtues to personality categories.

Developing one virtue while neglecting its complementary constraint: 勇 developed without 智 produces recklessness. 仁 developed without 严 produces permissiveness. Develop paired virtues together.

Using the framework to confirm a pre-existing assessment: If you have decided you like or dislike a leader, the virtue framework will produce evidence to confirm that decision. Score each virtue independently from observable evidence before forming an overall assessment.