Building Leadership Character

Amy Newman

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781544343099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Extending beyond traditional leadership books to offer readers a path for developing their own character, Building Leadership Character uses a storytelling approach and real-world cases to explore different dimensions of leadership character. With a clear, student-friendly writing style, bestselling author Amy Newman deftly captures various approaches in which corporations and people respond to situations in difficult times and learn from mistakes. Using real companies and situations, each chapter examines a leadership character dimension such as accountability, integrity, authenticity, and courage. Readers will learn to develop their own character, emotional intelligence, and leadership skills as they engage with assessments, reflection opportunities, and exercises.

1 Leadership Character in Context

Chapter Overview

Leadership character is cultivated and developed over time. We’ll start this chapter with a leader’s communication during the Great Recession to illustrate a failure of both character and communication—one of many exemplified throughout the book. From this situation and from positive examples, we’ll see that character is a combination of values, virtues, and traits and an important part of ethical decision making. Seven dimensions of character focus our efforts for self-development, which happens through reflection and practice. In the end, our goal is to live better, more meaningful lives and to support others in doing the same.

Leaders Choose Character

Before defining leadership character, we’ll see an illustration of a character failure. Leadership character is a matter of choice and not position; every one of us can demonstrate and develop character. Yet we don’t choose character just to “appear” to be better people; we want to live better lives and create better outcomes for more people in organizations.

Financial Industry Example

The financial crisis of 2008/2009—the Great Recession—threw 8 million Americans out of work¹ and led to almost 4 million home foreclosures in one year.² Eight years later, 6.7 million Americans are still “underwater,” meaning they owe more than their home is worth.³

As people were desperate to refinance their mortgages, hoping to stay in their homes, some sought external counsel and learned language they could use to appeal to their lenders, such as Countrywide Financial. When CEO Angelo Mozilo received customer emails, he got angry, and instead of forwarding one email, he accidentally hit “reply” with the message shown in Figure 1.1.⁴

In Mozilo’s communication, we see a failure to acknowledge others’ hardships and to demonstrate empathy. Critics of the banking industry said borrowers were misled about their loans and didn’t understand the risks of an adjustable-rate mortgage. But Mozilo blamed those who were struggling and failed to acknowledge the bank’s role.

Six years later, when the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles was planning a civil lawsuit against Mozilo, he still didn’t understand his responsibility. In an interview with Bloomberg News, he said he had “no idea” why the government was pursuing a suit; he also blamed real estate for the collapse: “No, no, no, we didn’t do anything wrong. Countrywide or Mozilo didn’t cause any of that.”⁵ Although one reporter calls Mozilo “a pioneer of the risky subprime mortgages that fueled the financial crisis,” the U.S. Justice Department decided not to pursue a case against him after all.⁶ Bank of America acquired Countrywide and later paid almost $17 billion in settlements because of faulty mortgages.⁷

Figure 1.1 Bank CEO criticizes homeowners

The Role of Character

Since the recession and other corporate scandals, educators and ethical corporate leaders have been asking, “How can we prevent another crisis?” Mary Crossan, Gerard Seijts, and others at the Ivey Business School in Canada researched the financial industry and identified leadership failures in competence, commitment, and, particularly, character as causes of the crisis.⁸

Competencies and commitment are important leadership components. Competencies are skills, abilities, and knowledge, for example, evaluating a mortgage application and understanding regulatory procedures. Commitment represents how much effort people put into using their competencies. Do they aspire to do good work? How engaged are they? What are they willing to sacrifice?⁹

Although competencies and commitment are important, Crossan and her colleagues identified character as the distinguishing factor for companies that “survived, or even prospered during the meltdown.”¹⁰ Through their research and interviews, they found character to be the driving force for building competencies and demonstrating commitment.¹¹

Character Defined

Character is the collection of traits, values, and virtues that define a whole, complete person. We see character in everything we do: how we think, feel, and behave. When we evaluate character, we take a holistic view to determine how that person is known to others.

Much of the groundwork on character is from positive psychology, which emphasizes living a fulfilling life. In their foundational book, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman identified character strengths that “contribute to various fulfillments that constitute the good life, for oneself, and for others.”^12,13

We choose character to contribute to the world and those around us in positive ways. Leaders at all levels of an organization choose, for example, how they interact with people on their team, whether they reward someone for taking initiative, how they assign work, and so on. They decide what is important to them and to those around them. Leaders have tremendous opportunities to impact the lives of others—to create good outcomes for the people they serve.

Our impact on others transcends our role in an organization and in society. Character is more than our position or status as a middle-manager, accountant, sister, or brother. Although companies assign employees a place on an organizational chart, we can lead from any position within an organization. Character-based leadership is about the choices we make.

Leaders with strong character take on issues beyond themselves. They are willing to step outside their role and engage in conflict to challenge institutions and “the way things are done around here.” They pursue greater goals for more people. Next, we’ll describe how virtues, values, and traits relate to character.

Virtues, Values, and Traits

Crossan and her colleagues adapted Aristotle’s virtues to create a model of leadership character in organizational decision-making contexts. Virtues are generally thought of as representing good moral behavior and are believed to be universal. All behaviors associated with character are considered virtuous; they become vices when they are deficient or when used in excess. For example, too much courage leads to recklessness and too little leads to cowardice.¹⁴

Values are individual, deeply held beliefs, such as loyalty. Values are formed by our religion, family, education, peer group, and other factors and may change over time. Crossan says values “are usually associated with words like ‘should’ and ‘ought,’ as in ‘Leaders ought to treat everyone with dignity and respect.’”¹⁵ Mary Gentile argues that values and virtues are both about goodness, but that values are also about what we desire. For example, we value loyalty and aspire to be loyal to others.¹⁶ These are subtle differences, and both authors acknowledge an overlap in definitions.

Although values vary among individuals, researchers and others argue that values, like virtues, are surprisingly consistent across cultures. As Peterson and Seligman describe, “We argue that these are universal, perhaps grounded in biology through an evolutionary process that selected for these aspects of excellence as means of solving the important tasks necessary for survival of the species.” In his book Moral Courage, Rushworth Kidder cites many studies showing consistently held values across continents and among prisoners, students, world leaders, and executives.¹⁷

Unlike values, traits, such as introversion or extroversion, are aspects of personality that may be inherited and are typically stable over time. Traits are believed to be more fixed than character, and they may influence our character. For example, if we’re conscientious, we may be more willing to be held accountable, one of the character dimensions we’ll explore in this book. Our focus in building leadership character is on behavior.¹⁸

Our Choices

Because character can be developed, we can choose to behav...