Benedict is attempting something far more difficult than describing an office. He is trying to describe the character of a person who can be trusted with authority over the lives of others.
Such a task immediately creates a tension. Leadership requires strength, yet Benedict distrusts domination. It requires judgment, yet judgment must be tempered by mercy. The leader must teach, correct, encourage, restrain, and occasionally make difficult decisions—but never forget that the people being led belong ultimately to God, not to the leader.
That may be why Benedict seems less interested in what we would call leadership skills than in the interior formation of the leader. Competence matters, but character matters more. The good leader must possess wisdom, goodness of life, discernment, humility, patience, and an extraordinary awareness of individual differences. What strengthens one person may crush another. What one member needs as correction another may need as encouragement.
And then comes perhaps the most sobering element: the community is called to recognize such a person among its own. Titles, seniority, education, administrative ability, charisma, wealth, or social standing cannot be allowed to substitute for wisdom and goodness.
Benedict therefore makes leadership a spiritual question before it is an organizational one:
Who among us has become sufficiently free of ego
to exercise authority for the good of others?
Perhaps that is Benedict's great contribution to leadership theory. The question is not primarily, Who can get things done? It is:
Who can be entrusted with people?
And those are very different questions.
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