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Christian pollster George Barna's latest book, A Fish Out of Water (Integrity), offers tips to help pastors and laypeople "maximize their God-given leadership potential." We quizzed Barna on the state of leadership today.

What makes an effective leader?

The most effective leaders we found are the ones who are not solo practitioners. They are individuals who are involved in a team of leaders. You get so much more from the blending of unique talents and skills than you can have from one person trying to do it all.

When you look at situations like the recent debacles at Enron, what does that suggest about the state of corporate leadership in America?

I think in a lot of ways it perfectly corresponds with what I'm talking about in the book. The C.E.O.s and execs who led those companies were people with great competencies—they've got the skills, they know how to run things efficiently, they can motivate people, they do all that stuff. What was the missing ingredient? Character. Because if they had godly character, they would have responded very differently in those situations.

What led to this character deficit?

It's the same old moral relativism. Take a situation like the one at Harvard Business School, which got rid of its ethics courses a few years back because the ethics professors said, "There's no foundation on which to teach any of this stuff." They couldn't agree upon what are the right principles and values on which to base ethical choices, so they gave up.

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