On a clear, breezy summer Saturday morning in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore, 10:12 Sports Director Jeff Thompson speaks to a young player about character in the context of a flag-football game. In the background, the Ravens and the Bengals play the fifth game of their season.
In this neighborhood, 60% children live below the poverty level, 80% of households with children under 18 are female-headed, unemployment is 17% and a quarter of kids never finish high school. The field where the young men play is half a mile from the scene of the uprising and violence surrounding the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.
This is the neighborhood where Jeff Thompson and his volunteers work with young men teaching the fundamentals of character and leadership from a Christian perspective. The lessons are framed against the backdrop of a flag-football league that also employees local youth on weekends as referees, linesmen, and statisticians.
Character is the foundation of almost any leadership model. The ability to “lead self” is crucial before one can attempt to apply almost any other leader competency. There’s much that a developing leader can read about the importance of character and no shortage of books on the subject. But no book can teach what we learn from credible mentors who serve as examples and who listen to understand.
Albert Schweitzer said, “Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.” Leadership guru Michael Useem took that same idea one step further: “Leadership is best learned from example and best communicated through example.”
Still a relative newcomer to Baltimore, I have joined the search for the magic, missing ingredients that once applied will cure the city’s woes. I know already that there isn’t any single thing. But on this Saturday morning these young men – in the context of a community who loves and cares for them and who holds them accountable for their actions – were experiencing the closest thing I have found to a foundational first step.
“Leadership is character in motion” (Les Csorba).
For these young men on any given Saturday there is more in motion than the football and the players on the field.
Chuck Callahan Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front https://henryv43.wordpress.com/
Henry V 4.3 
Navigating leadership of next generation GME program directors requires emulating examples of accountability, character, compassion, integrity, and “best practice”. Last week, our Human Factors courses at Oxford with 12 surgeons recognized their science aptitude necessary for medical school was not useful to lead diverse medical teams. The skills for touch football and marching bands were more suitable to engage in the people business of community medicine and serve the patient on their “field of play”.
Well said. Thank you David.