I think that first and foremost, to be a good leader you have to be good at what you do. Good leaders are not incompetent in their own content area. So charisma alone won't make you a good leader.

You don't get to leadership positions with charisma alone. That is a wonderful tool and a wonderful characteristic that will allow you to be more effective, but your first and foremost thing is to be very good at what you do. So if you're in an academic environment, you have to be a quality faculty member, or a quality student, or wherever you are in the chain. And you have to be able to continue to maintain this. I always say you have to take care of your day job.

And then the leadership usually is layered on top of the day job because leadership is not about you. Leadership is about representing our constituents. And the people who are poor leaders, who are the self-centered ones, who really are just there to be in the limelight, the folks who can't miss a camera, that they can't miss that opportunity to be in front, on stage. Rather, our responsibility as leaders is gathering information about what are the things important to our constituents and then trying to craft a message as well as a theme that you can negotiate on behalf of those constituents, and then come out and tell them what you can offer.

So, to me, leadership is about competence in your own specific area, not being about you and your interests, but being about your constituents' interests and never getting tired. And that's hard because leadership is one of those things that is hard to measure whether you've accomplished anything. And yet, you have to, again, if you keep revisiting why you're there and what you're doing, you can be successful.