Leadership is not about doing what is comfortable or easy. It is not about doing what everyone else is doing just because they are doing it. Leadership is about doing the right thing–even when it makes you uncomfortable, even when it is difficult, and even if the people around you revile you for doing so.

Leadership is never about manipulation of either people or the facts–no matter  how right you think your position is. Leadership is about following the evidence, wherever it takes you–even when it takes you somewhere you do not want to go.

Leadership is about saying the hard thing to people who want easy. It is about telling people the truth, even when a lie would serve you personally better.

Leaders inspire people to be better than they think they can be–to follow their better natures rather than their darker ones. Leaders turn our best dreams into visions–and visions into reality. Leaders do more than promise–they deliver.

Leaders do not manage problems–they solve them.

And when they succeed they do not claim the credit–they give the credit to the people who produced that success.

Jane was, in her classroom and in our school, that kind of leader. She was never a department chairman or administrator–but her standards set the tone for her students not only in her classroom but in every classroom they entered. She never told her students something was going to be easy when it wasn’t, but she always showed them how to succeed–and then made sure they worked to do so.

Her students learned chemistry and physics and biology. But they also learned to study and to learn and to succeed–and how to use those skills long after they left her classroom. They learned to work together toward a common goal–and how to get along with people who did not always share their values and beliefs. Every day she demonstrated to them what hard work was, what it meant to live a life in service to others, and why doing so mattered.

She never claimed credit for what she did. When she was named Teacher of the Year, she was shocked–and quickly gave me the names of three people she thought deserved it more. When a kid wrote to her about becoming a doctor or a nurse or a teacher or an engineer–or anything–she would smile and say it was all their work and ability–that she had nothing to do with it despite their claims to the contrary.

Yesterday I heard a Stage IV lung cancer patient who is a captain in the Navy talk about leadership–and how patients have to be leaders as well as patients–offering encouragement not only to themselves but to other patients, to their doctors and their nurses, even to their spouses and family members.

And I thought about Jane in that hospital room–about how she talked to everyone who came through that door–right down to the people who came in to wash the floor–how she engaged and encouraged each of them even while fighting for her life with all she had.

I wish the people at the State Houses across this country and the alleged leaders in the House and the Senate and the White House in Washington had even one percent of that quality of leadership. Our problems would melt beneath the intensity of their merest gaze–and then we could all get down to the real work of our time.