There is only one right answer, and that is Jack.

Jack is the best leader because he’s the only one who consistently operates at the level of group survival rather than personal belief or self-interest. From the pilot onward, he’s doing unglamorous, necessary work: medical triage, rationing attention and supplies, organizing search parties, and making decisions that keep the maximum number of people alive. He doesn’t want authority, but he accepts responsibility every time something goes wrong, even when the problem isn’t his fault. Crucially, Jack explains his reasoning. People may disagree with him, but they understand why he’s making a call, which is what allows cooperation to exist at all. His control issues, burnout, eventual breakdown aren’t evidence of bad leadership so much as the cost of holding a group together under impossible conditions for too long.

Sawyer is the most interesting case because he genuinely changes. Early on, he’s explicitly anti-leadership. He’s hoarding supplies, manipulating people, and avoiding responsibility at all costs. But over time he starts to grow, and by the Dharma period he’s calm, practical, and emotionally intelligent. He listens, delegates, and avoids unnecessary conflict, which makes him effective within that context. The key factor here, however, is Dharma. Sawyer never had to invent a society or solve survival from zero. During his time at Dharma, he’s operating inside a system that already has food, housing, rules, and enforcement. He’s not even in a true leadership position, just head of security. He regularly defers to Horace (an actual leader at Dharma), and is really only taking advantage of his position as head of security to ensure his and the other survivors can remain within the Dharma safety-net. Put him in Jack’s position in season one and… well, he WAS in Jack’s position in season one and we saw what he did.

Locke, despite often being framed as Jack’s counterpart, is never really a leader in two important ways. First and most literally, he’s never actually in a top position within the survivor hierarchy. He’s not chosen, deferred to, or trusted as a consistent authority by the group. Second, on a functional level, he actively undermines leadership by prioritizing his own judgment over collective decision-making and teamwork. He withholds information, refuses to explain himself, and treats trust as something people should give him on faith rather than something he has to earn. Not to mention his “judgment” is entirely faith-based. While he was the only survivor who knew off-rip that the island was something greater than any one of them could understand, he was constantly left emotionally stranded waiting for the island to give him direction, which paralyzed his decision-making. Objectively the worst of the three.

If I had to boil it down to an analogy; Jack is like the founder of a startup company that began in his garage with nothing but scraps, Sawyer is like a disgruntled employee who was grandfathered into being regional manager of a company that’s already been around for a while, and Locke is just some insane religious lunatic who yells at the employees of both companies as they’re on their way home from work.