If you’re a leader, you know it’s a little bit like marriage: You’re a leader in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse.

In other words, real leaders know they can’t just choose to be leaders when things are happy and times are good. If you accept the leadership mantle, you also buy into being the leader when things go bad and times are terrible—when those you are leading probably need your leadership the most.

And, that’s why you have to wonder about the would-be leadership of NBA superstar LeBron James.

Unless you are brain dead and living under a rock, you know LeBron. He’s 24, a mega-millionaire, and one of the best basketball players in the world. He helped lead the United States to a gold medal in men’s basketball last summer at the Beijing Olympics, and this year, he led his Cleveland Cavaliers to the best regular-season record in the NBA. Plus, he’s a one-man marketing machine with multiple national campaigns built around him—a person people like and aspire to be like.

Yes, LeBron has been a great leader and role model during this past year when things were going so well, but last weekend, he hit a bump in the leadership road. His Cleveland team was eliminated from the NBA playoffs by the Orlando Magic, and although James made a superhuman effort to will his team to victory and a place in the NBA Finals, it was not to be. Cleveland would not win an NBA championship this year.

That’s where the LeBron James leadership story takes a wrong turn.

Saturday night, after James and his Cleveland Cavaliers lost to Orlando, James did something very much unlike him, and very much unlike someone who has taken on the role of team leader: He walked away, silently, refusing to talk to the media or engage in the customary handshake with the other team. He then showered and quickly left the locker room, refusing to say anything to anyone.
 
On a night when his team lost and probably needed his presence and leadership most, LeBron James copped out. “There’s context to everything,” wrote columnist Michael Wilbon in The Washington Post, “even the decidedly unsportsmanlike act of walking off the court at the end of a crushing defeat without shaking your opponent’s hand. … You find out the true measure of an athlete’s character after just the kind of loss Orlando hung on the Cavaliers last week. So this, relatively speaking, is a pretty big goof.”

Diane Pucin in the Los Angeles Times put it plainly: “Hey, LeBron. You want to be a star and have puppets cavorting in your honor on television commercials? You let talk ebb and flow about how you need the bigger stage that New York might provide in another year when you are a free agent and everyone will beg for your otherworldly basketball talent and indisputable will to win? Then show up when it hurts too, when the world isn’t being operated like a, well, puppet on a string in your favor.”

LeBron James is no mere athlete; he is someone who has opted to take on a major leadership role in a major business with all that entails. To opt out and walk away from it because things go badly is the worst possible thing a leader can do, because it is in tough times and difficult circumstances when true leadership truly reveals itself.

Real leaders are leaders 24/7, in good times and in bad, when things go your way and, especially, when they don’t. Real leaders stand up and know that only when they learn to lead with dignity through the bad can they also stand up and bask in the glory of when things go good.

In other words, real leaders don’t take a night off, or skulk away because they just suffered a crushing defeat—especially if their name is LeBron James.

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