Leaders don’t always win. You can do all the right things in the right way and still fail at what you hoped to achieve. But failure is not always a sign of bad leadership. Failure, in fact, can be the result of the best leadership. In other words, even great leaders can’t guarantee, control, and produce the desired future and outcome. What they can control, though, is how they see their battles through. 

How we fight our battles through to the end is as important as, if not more important than, the final outcome. While defeat is not the purpose of leadership, it can still have a purposeful and “victorious” end result. 

“There are triumphant defeats that rival victories,” said Montaigne two thousand years after Thermopylae. A betrayer had led the Persians through a secret pass and 300 Spartans were now facing certain death. But before they died, the Spartan prince, Leonidas,  sent home a message. “Stranger, tell the Spartans that we behaved as they would wish us to, and are buried here.”

His words and their example gave rise to two decisive victories and the world-shaping city of Athens. 

A leader’s defeat and failure may have the triumphant result of inspiring those around him to take up the fight. They will be the ones who reap victory sown by the leader’s sacrifice, faith, conviction. A leader’s defeat may have the triumphant result of opening an unforeseen new path, of creating and establishing an unimagined new future.  

Not every defeat is the result of cowardice or ignorance, bad character or lack of planning. And it may not even be the result of anything the leader could or should have done better. Defeat will come. Loss is inevitable. But out of the ashes beauty can come. Out of sorrow joy can come. Out of death new life can come.

So how can we be triumphant in defeat? We must learn to fight our battles through to the end with both skill of integrity and integrity of skill. 

A leader has skill of integrity when in the face of defeat they don’t break under the pressure and compromise their character. Cutting corners, running away, seeking their own gain at another’s expense, blaming others, shirking their responsibility,…. It’s not an option. They are who they are everywhere they go, in everything they face.

A leader has integrity of skill when they use their gifts to the best of their ability, every time, for the sake of everyone. Since excellence is who they are, everything they do is above reproach. No one suspects or doubts them, neither in their work ethic nor in the quality of their work.

Leadership for all of us is always and only part-time. No single leader will be here forever. At the end won’t matter as much as how we fight, how we lead, to the end. And the best way to assess that is not always in victory, but always in defeat.