Character is the essence of leadership – not skill or talent or strategy or personality.

Even non-religious leaders affirm the importance of character, General Norman Schwarzkopf said, “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.”

Because character is king, it helps to be aware of the process God uses to form character in leaders. You can call this process the Diamond Life.

In the case of diamonds, the atoms themselves are more tightly arranged than they are in the pencil. It is the tightness of the bond that enables their beauty.

To form bonds that are tight enough to transform carbon into a beautiful diamond requires two things: 1) extremely hot temperatures, and 2) very high pressure.

The ‘suffering’ the elements go through in adverse conditions is what creates their beauty. This process usually takes place in the deep places of the earth where elevated temperatures and high pressure exist naturally.

God’s curriculum for growing leaders follows the same process. Saint Paul testifies,  “Suffering produces perseverance; and perseverance produces character” (Romans 5:3).

The old testament story of Joseph is a great illustration of the process and the power of the Diamond Life. If you are not familiar with his story, you may want to give it a read. You can find it in Genesis chapters 37-50.

After years of enjoying favored status in the home, Joseph ran into a series of significant setbacks. As a result of his brother’s jealousy, he was stripped of his position as favorite son, he was stripped of his coat of many colors and finally Joseph was sold into slavery by his own blood. They made it look as though he had been killed by a pack of wolves which devastated his parents.

Joseph lived in various settings of extreme hardship, including many years in prison. Everything he normally depended on was taken from him. Everything he previously leaned on for identity, status and a sense of belonging was no longer available.

He thought his life was over. Little did he know that the hardship and darkness was unfolding according to God’s plan. Joseph’s  “Diamond Life” was preparing him for the season of blessing and prosperity God had in mind even as he was going through hell.

The lesson holds true for us: the difficult things in our lives that we think are obstacles to growth, are the very experiences God is using to strengthen us – to refine us, to purify us, to mold us and fashion us into the image of His Son. It’s a bitter pill to swallow but the hard things of daily life are what transforms us.

Here are five lessons of leadership from Joseph’s Diamond Life that illustrate God’s process for growing a leader.

Lesson One: Reliance on God. Joseph had to learn dependency the hard way. Up until that point, he had it pretty good. There was no small amount of entitlement running through his blood.

Entitlement is the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment. Entitlement in the heart of a leader is a toxic element poisoning the soul. God led Joseph through a series of difficult circumstances to root-out entitlement from his heart.

Only when Joseph was at the end of himself, could grace burst in. Likewise for every leader – Holy Spirit initiated brokenness moves us from being self-reliant to spirit-reliant. “Blessed are the broken,” Jesus said.

Lesson Two: Integrity in the moment of choice. Just as things are getting better for Joseph, because his many natural talents were coming to bear, he is tempted to engage in sexual activity with Potiphar’s wife.

Each test of integrity on your leadership journey matters a lot. Temptations of every kind will forge habits that enable you to exercise integrity in the moment of choice or they will put you on the slippery slope of moral failure.

Many leaders have enough talent to take them further than their character can sustain them. They shoot up like a rocket and fall like a rock.  Not so with Joseph. He resisted the advances from Potiphar’s wife. This gave honour to his boss, to God and more importantly, and, perhaps unbeknownst to Joseph, it brought honour, dignity and respect to himself.

The integrity lesson can be summarized thus: Leading self, always precedes leading others.

Lesson Three: Empathy with others. When you look at his earlier life, Joseph was quite comfortable being the favorite son. When he had that dream about his brothers bowing to him, he didn’t soften the vision.

He wasn’t sensitive to the needs or the feelings of his own brothers. In short, he lacked empathy.

God moved him from the position of favored son to slave. Even after he did the right thing by resisting Potiphar’s wife, he was thrown in jail. That suffering was for his own good. It was all part of the Diamond Life, God’s process of forming a leader worth following.

Being thrown in jail, after doing the right thing, must have been a gut-wrenching and humiliating process. He found himself with two nameless men wasting their days in a prison cell.

In prison Joseph discovered the sorrows, the struggles, the pits and the prisons of other people. There’s nothing like being on the same level as everyone else to figure out how to treat others with dignity and respect.  He learned the lesson of empathy, he learned another valuable lesson – that the vast expanse of the universe begins at the tip of your nose.

Lesson Four: The importance of trust. Stephen M.R. Covey, son of Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), suggests the following: Trust is one thing common to every relationship. Every friendship, every marriage, every business team, every community, culture and economy in the world.

Trust is the one thing which if removed, would destroy the strongest marriage, the deepest friendship, the most flourishing community, the most cohesive team. And that one thing is trust. Trust is the one thing that changes everything.

Trust is the foundation of leadership. Just as the home in which you live cannot expand outside the foundation on which it is built, so your leadership will never grow bigger than the foundation of trust on which it is built.

Making and keeping promises is the surest way to build trust and the quickest way to lose it.

Over time, Joseph gained the trust of people because he kept his word, to the prisoners and to the Pharaoh. He was faithful in the small things.

Lesson Five: Results. Notice it is the final lesson to be learned in the Diamond Life. Only when we have learned the other lessons are we ready to learn about results.

The world encourages us as leaders to go for the short cut – to go after results first and foremost.

What do you call it when you get a hit at home plate and you run directly to third base? Little league! It’s cute when little 4 and 5 year old’s run to third base when they get a hit. But it’s not cute when 40 or 50 year old adults try to cheat the system, take short cuts or advance their careers by ignoring policy or using people.

Leaders are continually tempted to take the short cut, to by-pass the God-initiated process of the Diamond Life, to go for results before learning the lessons of dependency, integrity, empathy and trust.

In his earlier life, Joseph was all about rushing to results. He was pleased as punch to tell his brothers about his vision, “I am standing and you are bowing, any questions?”

But God had bigger plans in mind. Two more years in prison before the Pharoah comes calling. God, seeing that Joseph has embraced the Diamond Life and learned it’s valuable lesson, takes him from the prison to the palace in one day.

Joseph reconciles with his brothers and amazingly, the entire nation of Israel is saved from famine because Joseph was in a place of leadership within Pharoah’s house to ensure that his people were supported.

What Joseph saw as a dream for self-glory, God was planning for His glory and the glory of the nation Isreal – now that’s results!

As a leader, when you are doing everything you can to realize a dream and it seems like it is dying, God might be writing a bigger story.

He is using the diamond life to form something beautiful in you. Don’t quit.