Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

You’ll find more about Mary’s research at https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/leadership. Her podcast, Question of Character, is online at https://www.questionofcharacter.com. The site also has an archive of essays on leadership character.

Mary’s book, Developing Leadership Character, is on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3PKZQfw. The seminal (and very robust and expensive) book establishing character research which Mary referenced is Character Strengths and Virtues by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman. It’s available on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3TVsyNp.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Mary Crossan is a Distinguished University Professor at Western University – Western’s highest honour recognizing excellence in teaching, research, and service. In 2021, she was recognized on a global list representing the top two percent of the most cited scientists in her discipline. She teaches in the undergraduate, MBA, Ph.D., and Executive Programs. Her research on organizational learning, strategy, leadership character, and improvisation has been widely published in such journals as the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, the Journal of Management Studies, Leadership Quarterly, and Organization Dynamics. She has extended her research to management practice through a collection of over 50 cases, many of which have been published in a book she co-authored entitled Strategic Management: A Casebook. She is also an author of the Strategic Analysis and Action textbook. In a joint venture between the Ivey Business School and the Second City Improvisation Company, she developed a management video entitled “Improvise to Innovate,” which extends traditional concepts of strategic management to development tools and techniques for more innovative, flexible, and responsive strategic action. Her recent research focuses on the development of leader character as a critical foundation to support and elevate leader competencies. She and her colleagues have developed courses, cases, and a diagnostic assessment to develop leader character. The “Developing Leadership Character” book is a culmination of the team’s research on leader character. She is also a co-host of the Question of Character podcast series. She works with organizations around the world on developing and investing in leader character.

Transcript
(auto-generated)

Speaker 1 0:07
With me on the show today is Mary Crossan. In this episode, Dr. Crosson describes what leadership character is, why it matters, and how to develop it. Welcome. Thank you. Let’s talk about how you got involved in leadership character in 2008 with the economic crisis in full swing at the Ivy Business School. We did some introspection and said, what were the failures of leadership? How were we possibly culpable in what had happened? And then put some ideas together in a white paper that we shared with leaders around the world in focus groups, where we said, “Here’s what we think what went wrong, and here’s what we need to learn from it. Help us tell us what we’re missing. And in those meetings, the piece that struck us is that they kept talking about character, something we hadn’t anticipated, but the problem was they didn’t know what character was. There was no agreement, and most people thought you couldn’t develop it. So, even if we could define what it was, there was some concern about what would its relevance be if we couldn’t develop it in terms of a leadership education. So, they turned to us and said, Can you guys figure it out? So, that has now been a 10 year journey. I think what’s important to establish out of that origins is that we felt whatever we did, we wanted to be able to elevate character alongside competence in business schools and in organizations. We underestimated how important it was in education in general. So now, for example, at Western University, all incoming PhDs in all disciplines would have a character-based workshop. So, this isn’t just business schools, this is if you’re in engineering or biology or chemistry or history, you name it. Character is important. So, we’re pretty excited after your research. How are you defining character? It is their agreement on what it is. Well, we were really fortunate that in 2008 when we were trying to solve this issue. Of course, as academics, we go back to what’s the state of the theory and empirics on character. Of course, we have millennia of writing in philosophy on what character is. We were fortunate that Martin Seligman and Christoph Peterson, who are very noted psychologists, had already done massive heavy lifting on it. They had written pretty much a 700 page research book called Character Strengths and virtues, and had used a set of criteria to help identify virtues that transcend cultures, transcend time, could be used across religions. They had been able to do this particular work and had developed, in fact, an instrument that we began to use in organizations, and then found that there were some issues that, for us, their work had been to identify character as it relates to well-being, and here we were looking at leadership in organizations, so it took about six years of engaged scholarship, taking all the great theory and empirical work on it, but then working with executives to honor the theory, but also to understand how it could be used in practice, and I’ll give you a practical example of that. In the work on humanity, Peterson and Seligman had the word love when it came to organizations trying to grasp what character was the word love, quite frankly, was way too threatening, whereas we have other behaviors under humanity like empathy and compassion, no problem. So, what we did was adjust some of the wording and the behavior, so that we could work with something that was credible in organizations and wouldn’t be really set aside simply because there were some tweaks and things that had to happen to it, so six years later we had developed a framework with 11 dimensions of character, the 11th dimension is judgment, and that’s what Aristotle would have called practical wisdom, and it sits in the middle of the framework, drawing on all of the other dimensions, dimensions such as courage and transcendence and humility, humanity, drive, etc.

Maureen 4:35
One, it’s surprising that it didn’t exist, because we all refer amorphously to someone of character, someone of wisdom. So I like that judgment is in the middle. So, what are some of the common misconceptions about character?

Speaker 1 4:49
Because character is derived from virtue ethics, people ended up shortchanging it around simply about ethics and being a good person and. And if you’re going to be a good person, as they often would say to us, you’re operating with one hand behind your back. What we felt they had missed out of understanding character is that it not only contributes to individual well-being but sustained excellence. So one of the first pieces of misconception is that it’s about high performance, as well as it is about being a good person. In fact, we typically stay away from ethics and morality when we talk about character, because people end up putting it in the wrong box when they think about why character matters. If you can picture, we use like a normal curve, you can picture that, and that, what does it take to operate plus two to three standard deviations from the norm? It is a place of loneliness for people, it’s a place where you don’t necessarily have supporters, it’s a place of innovation and creativity, and it’s a place where it takes a lot of courage, it takes a lot of drive, transcendence, humility, et cetera, to be able to operate there, so when we position it that way, then people begin to understand that first misconception is that if you’re not operating with character, you’re operating with one hand behind your back, it’s character and competence working together. I would say that would be the first misconception about it. Another one would be that you can’t develop character, so it is striking how many people at first blush think, well, I was always told that you were whatever was by the time you were five years old you had become the person that you are, you were formative, those are formative years, but

Maureen 6:39
boy, I hope that universities are built to develop

Speaker 1 6:42
well, absolutely. And character is a habit of behavior, it’s simply habit, and we have these virtuous habits. So, luckily, I get to work with great scholars in the area of exercise science. So, we use the analogy of if you’re going to physically exercise, you know how many people have their steps on their watch, right, telling them, reminding them what they have to do every day to build that habit of exercise. Well, we look at character the same way. You can put an exercise plan in place around how you’re going to exercise these dimensions of character, so that’d be the second misconception. The third one would be that it’s all subjective, and that one is absolutely false in the sense that good social science is built on understanding how do we define something that we’re looking at. What are the observable behaviors, and for example, for us, we would have a 360 assessment, 360 meaning your leaders, subordinates, colleagues, et cetera, multiple people looking at those behaviors and all identifying whether or not there’s strength or weakness in it.

Maureen 7:48
I love the idea that there’s an objective framework and that people agree on it, and the reason I love that is it takes it away from I can’t do that or whatever objection one would have, that there’s a framework I can work to, and I can build the habits, so we know from neuroscience that I’m, I have programmed my brain, or it has programmed itself, whatever, that I have habits that are unconscious, and that by being conscious I can then build humility,

Speaker 1 8:21
and a piece just to leverage what you just said, go even a little deeper than this, is that there’s fundamental underpinnings, physiology, affect, behavior, and cognition that support the development of character. So often we privilege cognition in development, but think about things like empathy and compassion, they have a big affect, affect is your emotion, feeling, and mood, and temperance, which is your patience and calm side of things, has a big physiological component. So, in the development of character, you’re looking at developing these big systems while you’re developing something like temperance or humanity or humility, so we’ll use some non-traditional ways, like a music workshop. We know that music bypasses the cognitive function. It can be used to activate your physiology and the affect, so you can activate on something like transcendence, you know, that sense of optimism or possibility about things, or you could activate on something like temperance that makes you patient or patient or calm. It’s also interesting that people believe that character is a disadvantage. One of the aspects that would be important for people to understand is Aristotle described that every potential virtue operates like a vice. His language was an excess or deficiency, but what he really meant is not that you want an average level of it, but take something like integrity that everybody believes, well, you couldn’t have too much integrity. Well, if you have a high level of integrity, but you don’t have a lot of humility to go along with it, you’re simply a. Dogmatic individual, right? If you don’t have a lot of humanity to go along with that integrity, or you don’t have a lot of justice to go along with it, you’ve got these principles, and you’re candid, and you’re transparent, and you’re authentic.

Maureen 10:12
Sometimes too much is not hope.

Speaker 1 10:14
That’s exactly the same

Maureen 10:15
kind that

Speaker 1 10:16
says this is exactly the point. So you don’t want to diminish your, and you know, that that volume of integrity, but you actually want to elevate and ensure that you have strength in all of the dimensions of character, so that the integrity doesn’t operate like a vice. The aha moment for us in the organizations we worked with is that they overweight on character dimensions like drive and accountability and integrity, possibly courage, and they underweight on things like humility and humanity, and they’ve created a situation in which they have what could be virtues actually operating like vices.

Maureen 10:54
Interesting. So, how do you help people bring it into bandwidth?

Speaker 1 10:57
So, the development side of things is that we have programs to develop all of those 11 dimensions of character. What we find is that the knowledge, even just I think for your listeners, is just understanding what character is helps to bring some awareness to the fact that humility actually isn’t something that’s a weakness for people, it’s actually a huge engine for learning, and so humility in its virtuous state, along with courage and drive and accountability, is just a powerful part of character. And I think partly just becoming aware of the facets of character goes a long way to help people develop it.

Maureen 11:37
We built a leadership competency model that was published by the ILA a few years ago, and humility was the first one that, without humility, I’m difficult to deal with, but overdone. To your point, I’m not going to be respected,

Speaker 1 11:52
and we are finding in every area of social science, because unfortunately we tend to compartmentalize things, right? So we’ve got grit. Grit is everything, or authenticity is everything. And what we typically find in all of these studies is a curvilinear relationship, low and high levels of grit, not so good, moderate levels good. My sense is that it’s because we’ve never understood them in the full complexity of character. Grit would be by courage and drive, some of those things coming together, but picture that somebody who has that at the highest level also needs a lot of temperance. So this kind of complete aspect of understanding now fully what character is gives us back to the exercise science model, a better understanding of the sort of anatomy of character and understanding how all of these facets work together, so that you don’t have virtues operating like vices.

Maureen 12:48
What’s also then interesting that, and not surprising that overdone, I burn myself out, but I also create a business that’s not sustainable. If I’m overly focused on profit, I may tip on the ethics piece, as in Enron. On other sides, I’m sure they’re also true.

Speaker 1 13:07
We find there’s a lot of regulators, people in compliance interested in this, because back to that normal curve I talked about, we’re interested in the right hand side, they’re really concerned with the left hand side, the negative devin, and there have been $320 billion of fines globally in the financial services since 2008 and so regulators are saying, well, how do we deal with this? This is not people with devil horns doing bad things. What we want to do is pivot away to understanding that we have people who have weaknesses in character leading to bad judgment, and that bad judgment unravels pretty fast in organizations, leading to a lot of the misconduct that we’re looking at, and when I use the term weak character, somebody once said to me, said, “Boy, that’s really harsh statement. I said, “The issue about character is I don’t think we’ve understood the strength of character required simply to navigate day in and day out, and it’s not just for leaders and organizations, it’s for young people. I think any parent would understand if they’re developing their kids, they’re developing character, there’s a lot of, you know, challenge that they face in the world. We need a lot more character than we currently have to exercise the judgment that we’re looking for.

Maureen 14:25
Well, and as you talk about some of it being overdone, overdone grit, overdone drive, we don’t think of those as being a person of weak character, but if not balanced with ethics, it shows up, the end result is weakness. A

Speaker 1 14:38
lot of times these problems don’t you know, show up while I’m making an ethical decision, right? So, what I like to look at it is that people who have strength of character alongside competence, they’re bringing the best quality of judgment and decision making, and that means I worry less about sure organizations. For profit organizations are going to have to deliver shareholder value. I typically call that a low bar. If you’re aiming for that, there’s a lot, a lot more that you can do, a lot more than inspires people. They’ll deliver the shareholder value, but they’ll can also do a whole bunch of other things, right? When you’re unlocking strength of character and competence and bringing that judgment to the work that you do. Therefore, the ethics tends to take care of itself in the process, because it’s the quality of judgment that you’re bringing. So, it sounds like that also gets built into the culture and the systems and processes. You’ve got it, boy, right on, boy, you’re fast learner. We have a chart that we set up a table, and we look at when character is present, when those 11 dimensions of character are present. What are the behaviors in the organization? And then picture on the right hand side, when they’re absent, what are the behaviors in the organization? And we ask people, what’s the culture that you desire? We typically find that essentially the culture that everybody wants is a culture of character. What they’re getting is the absence of character. So, the beauty about this is that if you want to manifest the culture that you aspire to, what you’re doing is investing in the character of the individuals in the organization. So, largely your culture will be a reflection of the character of the individuals, you know. Unfortunately, a lot of people just are unconscious of culture. It got there over a

Maureen 16:30
number of years or decades, and it is what it is, and we don’t think about the habits and the characteristics that we’re really driving to, and then the systems that are required to make those happen.

Speaker 1 16:43
I’ve spent a lot of time prior to my work and character in the space of organizational learning for strategic renewal, so a lot on the system side of things. So, having spent 20 years in that space, what I do understand is that people have never grasped the strength of character for people to operate in those systems, and that you actually put less pressure on the system once you understand if people have the strength of character, you actually aren’t looking at those systems to try to guide what it is that they do. So now we typically look at, if you don’t like the culture, look inside, look at your character, look at the behaviors, cultures, ultimately shared beliefs and values, right, that gets embedded also in the artifacts of the organization. What happens then? And I’ll take Canada Revenue Agency, where they have now hired a new position, Director of Character Leadership. Oh, really? And they select at the executive level on the basis of character as well as competence. What they would have looked at is, yes, we want to have this character-based culture, but our systems of HR practice, in terms of hiring, isn’t attending to character, so we need to adjust that system. So, I think systems follow once you begin to understand character matters, and then how are we going to embed it in the organization,

Maureen 18:06
and it seems like it has to be both

Speaker 1 18:08
character and competence. You mean, well, or they

Maureen 18:11
also, if we want character, we also have to create systems, and I realized that if we hired everyone of high character, we would need less. That’s on the system. Sorry,

Speaker 1 18:21
that’s right.

Maureen 18:22
But I’m not sure we can only hire people of, because nobody hires people, and I don’t think that say I’m looking for people of low character. That’s generally at least I don’t talk to people who say I want low character.

Speaker 1 18:36
So a lot of times they don’t think about character. I worked with a professional hockey team at the NHL combines prior to the draft, I would be with them to help them understand the strength of character of the players. They all are, they clearly want competent players, yeah, but they would be one of the few teams that’s there interviewing specifically on the on the strength of character. So, I think your point is really well taken around, you want your systems to be character aligned. You want to make sure that, for example, in understanding the promotion of leaders, that you’re also thinking about promoting leaders of character as well as competence.

Maureen 19:13
Yeah, as you say that, succession comes to mind, that as I’m looking for succession all the way up, being clear that that character is a non-negotiable, but to your point, it’s, it’s often unspoken and unconscious and not picked for.

Speaker 1 19:32
So our hope is that we bring a science, we bring a set of tools around this, like self-assessments, 360 assessment, we’re working on an app where people could develop on a daily basis. Oh, wow, character development and an understanding about how to align this in all of your HR practices. So, the beauty about this is that it’s not a tough sell for people to understand that character matters for the individuals in organizations. They certainly get it for leaders in organizations, they get it for boards of directors, they get it for regulators, they get it.

Maureen 20:07
Well, they definitely want it, right, because it makes their job easier.

Speaker 1 20:11
I’ve never seen anything in over 30 years in management research and practice that has such alignment amongst all stakeholders, and then all the full toolkit that allows us to embrace it. So, certainly many organizations already making the change, but the many organizations simply becoming aware of the possibility. Can you tell us the list of character items? Okay, so we’re going to walk through 11 dimensions of character. We talk about them as the dimensions, and then the elements as the behaviors that you would be thinking about to support that. So, let’s go with some obvious ones. Let’s start with judgment. We talked about judgment as equivalent to Aristotle’s practical wisdom. It’s in the middle of the wheel that we talk about in character. It has a lot of behaviors, and many that you would be familiar with, being situationally aware. In the case of leaders, this would be a lot of bandwidth. This capacity, you’re not looking down at your phone all the time, but you have this ability to be able to scan around you and understand what’s going on. You’re cognitively complex, that is, you can think through things fairly clearly. You’re analytical, you’re decisive, you’re a critical thinker. A piece that we may not be thinking an awful lot about on the cognitive side is also being really intuitive, and that also supports being insightful, pragmatic, adaptable. That actually has the longest list of behaviors of all of the character dimensions. The interesting aspect about judgment, which is not new to a lot of people, is that those behaviors themselves can operate like a vice if not supported by the other dimensions of character. So, for example, it’s easy to see if you don’t have the humanity that infers or supports your decisiveness and being analytical and a critical thinker, and you think in a box about those kinds of things. So, let’s go over to something like humanity, being considerate, empathetic, compassionate, magnanimous, which is a hard word for a lot of people, but it’s, it’s really being that big-spirited individual, and a behavior that many of us struggle with, which is being forgiving. A third one is humility, and if we think a look at humility, it has some really powerful engines for learning: being self-aware, modest, reflective, curious, continuous learner, respectful, grateful, vulnerable. Fourth, integrity, being authentic, candid, transparent, principled, consistent. Consider just authenticity alone as a challenge for many people. No, therefore, we wonder why it is that people don’t act with integrity while they haven’t developed the behaviors associated with integrity, so let’s go to the fifth one. Then, temperance, being patient, calm, composed, self-controlled, prudent. In the earlier segment, we talked about temperance having a big physiological basis to it. Development of temperance, for example, things like yoga, mindfulness, meditation, would really be helpful in that area. The sixth area is justice, that really plays out heavily in areas of understanding diversity and inclusion agendas. What is fair, equitable, proportionate, even-handed, becoming somebody who’s socially responsible. Moving on, let’s take a look at accountability. You’re a person who takes ownership, accepts consequences, you’re conscientious and responsible, and I think when you think about something like accountability, you’re thinking about how do you grow that, not simply to yourself, to your colleagues, but how do you grow it in terms of your responsibilities in society take a look at another dimension, courage, that is being brave, determined, tenacious, resilient, and confident. Now we’re moving on to one that many people don’t really think about, but I think it provides a lot of horsepower in terms of character, which is transcendence, and the behaviors associated with transcendence, or being appreciative, inspired, purposive, optimistic, creative, future-oriented. So, consider that you’re actually trying to develop those behaviors day in and day out in your life that allow you to cultivate that capacity of being that is really quite uplifting. And, in contrast, another dimension of character, we got two more to go here, one is drive, that is becoming a person who is passionate, vigorous, results-oriented, demonstrates initiative, strives for excellence, we want to there distinguish between a person who’s driven versus a person who has drive, and this is not about being.

Speaker 1 24:59
A perfectionist, but actually understanding what excellence is, and finally collaboration, and actually I realize we have two more to go. We’ve got collaboration, which is being cooperative, collegial, open-minded, flexible, and interconnected, and because many people talk about teamwork and some degree collaboration, they don’t understand that to become a person who’s open-minded, flexible, interconnected is actually a challenge. We use practices of things like improvisation to develop collaboration, and finally, humanity. Actually, we did talk about humanity right at the at the get-go. So we’re all good. We’ve covered them off.

Maureen 25:38
This is an extremely difficult list of of words, and I’m thinking things like I occasionally lack courage. There were times that people do things that really I find in conflict with my values, but they’re important to my business, so I don’t speak up as, as much as I would like to. I can see areas for opportunity, and one of the other ones that stands out often, people resist the word judgment because they think it is judgmental versus discerning, and good judgment is foundational, and it’s it for some reason in our society has gotten a bad rap that I’m not supposed to be judgmental, and yet, without silent judgment, I’m not a good thinker.

Speaker 1 26:25
Yufia absolutely hit on some of the key aspects of it, and I think when you think about the development of character, you’d be wanting to think about it along a continuum, in that as you’re developing character, you could activate on some of these dimensions. We’ve talked in the earlier segment about using music to activate on facets of character, and as you move to strengthen it, you’re talking about how do these dimensions of character interact, support one another, and how do they hold across context and time things that would stress test character time pressure. A lot of people realize I’m not my best self, right? In terms of I’m under pressure,

Maureen 27:04
I’m exhausted,

Speaker 1 27:05
or I’m exhausted. And what you pick up about that for something like drive, if you want to be able to cultivate drive, vitality, there is a physical quality to it. So you’re constantly investing in who you are that brings that sense of vitality day in and day out. When you think about well-being, here’s another piece: many people are exhausted by the end of the day. In the earlier segment, we talked about operating two to three standard deviations from the norm, right? Being that person who’s operating with excellence, well, that can be really tiring for people. However, when you’re actually operating with strength of character, you bring – I would call it more of an ease about how you operate in that space. So, for example, when you become frustrated with other people and you become impatient with other people, that actually undermines your well-being. That is the kind of stuff that makes you exhausted, but where you have strength in humanity, and you begin to understand why people may be resisting something in a particular way, and yet your transcendence is there. You know it to be important, you know it’s possible, and you’ve got the drive for excellence around it, and you’ve got the temperance that’s giving you the patience and calm. You navigate that space more easily, and being less exhausted, but you also, in collaboration with others, you know they don’t become all riled up, because once you become impatient and impatiently frustrated, right, it’s contagious. So that’s a piece we didn’t get talking about the last segment, but character is contagious, for better or for worse. It’s exciting, right, to think about the fact that people with strong character can activate on the character of others.

Maureen 28:48
So, you’ve connected a little bit about well-being, that both well-being is required to have good character, strong character, and that strong character supports also reinforces well-being.

Speaker 1 29:01
Yeah, yeah, it’s a really important connection. In fact, the origins of character has been around wellbeing, and I’ll give you an example. I’ve worked with a clinical psychologist who shared with me, which I love, this definition of anxiety, which is a simple calculation, numerator and denominator, and on the numerator is overestimation of danger, fear, but our brains are wired for that, and think about the fact. If you think about character, is where you have courage and transcendence and humility, you’re less likely to overestimate what that danger and fear is. For example, the fear that many people face is a fear of looking foolish, or a fear of looking stupid, or a fear of being judged, and when you have a lot of strength of character, a lot of those fears drop off. The denominator of that formula is underestimating your capacity to deal with

Maureen 29:56
it, right. So

Speaker 1 29:57
now when you think about the personal resource. Is is that no matter if you step into a situation that may be unknown or unfamiliar, and you’re worried, maybe you’re giving a presentation about something. So many people will say to me, How do you do this? It’s like, well, if you have strength of character around these things, or you’re constantly developing, you are worrying less about what others think about you. You know that if you forget something, you’ll just talk about the fact that you forgot, and you know you’ll be transparent or authentic about it. People will likely actually find that fairly humorous, and then in that moment you’ll regain your footing, and it’s your humanity. You know, people aren’t looking for you to be perfect at what the what you do really people are doing is looking at you, you being authentic at what you’re doing. So I love that around wellbeing, that when you think about common things like anxiety that many people face, strength of character would help. And quite frankly, I think for your listeners, take a look at any major challenge that you face in your life, and you said, if I had more strength in these dimensions of character, would it help me navigate that? And I think the answer is absolutely, yeah,

Maureen 31:12
yeah. If I had more courage, I would be able to deal with, I would be willing. I’m not unable.

Speaker 1 31:19
Yes,

Maureen 31:20
I have chosen not to, in some cases, engage in conversations that I think probably won’t matter, like why am I going to bother to say something to someone that I think will potentially injure me professionally, but more likely just be ignored,

Speaker 1 31:37
and I love the word you use, choice, because when we talk about character, really, we’re talking about building the possibility of choice for somebody. Judgment doesn’t tell you what choice you’re going to make, but it ensures that you have a choice, because if you have courage, you have the choice to speak up. You may not, right? You may choose not to, but it’s not because you lack the courage to do it, and there’s a quote from Victor Frank Holt’s man’s search for meaning, which are quite like it’s between stimulus and response. There’s a space in that space is our power to choose our response, and in that response lies our growth and our freedom. But I think he underestimated the strength of character required to choose, and so what we want to do is, if we can develop these muscles of character, then we have the capacity to choose,

Maureen 32:28
and it seems like through the conference every interview I’ve had has had a bit of choice as a theme.

Speaker 1 32:35
It’s a little bit like the Nike commercial, just doing, you know, a lot of times when we think about choice, we think about it. Well, it’s this or that. I think the story around character is you actually don’t have a choice if you haven’t strengthened your character to make the choice to be in a position to navigate what that choice is. Lacking humility means that you’re protecting your ego, for example, around thing, lack of humanity means you may not be aware of all of the positions and issues that people face, for example, lacking temperance means you lost lack the patience to be able to actually figure out more choices, what the choices are, so that’s that’s the theme there with what as an organization, if I want to promote character of my people, right? I heard 360 I heard an app. Tell me more about

Maureen 33:30
what can I do.

Speaker 1 33:31
So, what we find with organizations around this that we typically talk about, well, just start with awareness, and if I use, I mentioned CRA in the last segment. What they started with is an executive forum, I think they probably had about 400 of their leaders exposed to a leader character was okay. And then there was a leader within that who had mandate around selection of executives, and she took off the corner of her desk. Wow, we need to think about hiring on character as well as competence. And then began that particular aspect of it. So every organization we work with has a different entry point. We will, they will usually start with an awareness workshop and then say, oh, we’re working on culture, so how might character help us define our culture? Or we’re looking at performance management, or how might we be able to do that, or it’s strategic renewal, or it’s diversity and inclusion, or it’s compliance. So character infuses virtually everything you do in the organization with a different quality, so it doesn’t really matter where you start on the agenda, you’re going to find yourself affecting all of these really core processes and organizations.

Maureen 34:48
So, what I hear that’s critical is it’s not just a workshop,

Speaker 1 34:52
correct? The workshop kicks things off. We typically think about three areas of investment in leader care. Character one would be the awareness side of things. A second area is embedding it in the organization, in your HR practices and processes, key processes. And a third is development, and so that development, that’s where the app, that’s where the self-assessment 360 assessment comes in. This is where organizations embed leader character into existing leadership development, and our aim is to make sure that in the hands of every individual is something where they can get their own individual development plan to exercise character on a daily basis.

Maureen 35:34
So I could look at the app and it would give me a plan for what I do,

Speaker 1 35:38
that’s

Maureen 35:39
whether it’s improvisation or getting enough sleep,

Speaker 1 35:41
that’s right,

Maureen 35:42
and in some cases both, that’s

Speaker 1 35:45
right, that’s right.

Maureen 35:46
So, how important do you think character is to the ongoing business agenda?

Speaker 1 35:51
I’ve never seen anything more important than this development of character, because it just hits on so many levels, and I think that different people love it for different reasons. The individuals in organizations love it because it’s about their own personal well-being and their excellence in what it is that they do. Organizations as leaders love it because they begin to understand, and we call leader character the disposition to lead that they understand that they need to develop that strength of character throughout the organization, and so it’s not this sort of hierarchical notion of, you know, a bunch of leaders who are then trying to motivate a whole bunch of other people around what it is that they’re doing, as I mentioned before, regulators, people in compliance, they’re going. How do we elevate the quality of judgment and decision making in organizations, so that we can address some of these areas, right, of misconduct? I think, in general, in society, if we take a look at how we operate, right, we want that kind of strength of character. Essentially, we want our societies to be reflecting that quality of character in it, so we’ve got this sort of situation in which not only is it critically important but individuals, organizations, stakeholders, they’re all on side with what they need to do, and then all of the tools are in place to do it. What we continue to talk about is that it’s now at the top of corporate agendas to elevate character alongside competence, and that’s just an exciting place to be. It’s exciting, and

Maureen 37:30
part of me says it’s also going to be hard, even though it’s the right thing to do, and it makes implicitly perfect sense, like no one can make the argument that we want to have an organization with no character, but dealing with weak egos and insecurity and things that are wired into the human species is hard to do.

Speaker 1 37:51
You know, it’s interesting that when we’re coaching on character, what you typically find in organizations, that the very things that are troubling a leader in an organization are also troubling them outside of the organization, so one of the motivations that they find about this, so whereas competency is largely within the organization, you think of any character is your life, and I think when people begin to realize that the very issues that they’re facing personally and professionally are on the same plane. It may be daunting, but there’s a lot of motivation to be able to develop and mitigate some of those issues.

Maureen 38:32
It’s interesting, the overlap between your character model and our leader competency model that I hadn’t thought about when we developed it. How much we baked character in in coaching people. I love that I get feedback that from their spouses and significant others. Like this has made a big difference in our lives. Their entire lives change,

Speaker 1 38:53
and it’s that’s exciting to see. So I’ll just add one piece then about because many organizations have elements of character in their either values or competencies. The integrity would be an example. We value integrity. I say something like integrity, valuing it is like telling somebody to run a marathon and not train for it. So, when it comes to thinking about some of these aspects and then character as a value, you’re saying all right. When we understand it as character, now we start to think about how do we train to live that value we want on the competency side. I think that something like collaboration would be often in a competency model,

Maureen 39:38
and that’s one of the ones that

Speaker 1 39:39
is it is, and what we typically then say, I don’t worry about people changing their competency models. Is that understand that often, because we pick and choose things in competencies, we may have overweighted implicitly, we cherry pick a few aspects of things, and we. Put them in the competency, and then we wonder why we don’t actually get collaboration, for example. So, what we do try to help organizations understand is that when you’re treating character as a piece in and of itself, it’s a standalone piece. It resides within the individual. There’s a science, there’s tools and techniques about being able to do that. What then you get is that I use it kind of an illustrated example, is that your character is like the roots of a tree system, and they bring to the culture of the organization, which is like the trunk, it gives you that kind of, you know, strength in that trunk of the tree, and then your leaves and branches are like your competencies, so your character infuses your competencies with a different kind of quality of life.

Maureen 40:52
That’s interesting, because we talk about not only the behaviors, but the mindset that I collaborate because I value input from others. Just I see the interconnection, which is really exciting, and I love the idea that there is a model, there’s a framework, it’s well researched, it’s not just stuff people made up, and that there are tools for people to get there. So, how would our listeners, how do they reach you?

Speaker 1 41:17
So, the best place to be able to access all of the work that we’re doing is through the Inato, it’s Institute for Leadership, and you can find that at www dot ivy, that’s i v e y.ca/leadership Those would be certainly at the Ivy Business School. Leadership Institute is the place to be at all of our resources. Yeah,

Maureen 41:42
perfect. Thank you so much. This is absolutely foundational, as you know, to living in this time.

Speaker 1 41:49
Yes, that in fact we’re really excited about all of the kinds of things that we’ve got in play, lots of tools available for this.

Maureen 41:58
Well, it seems required that if I want to do it, I can’t just sink it into being. I have to take action to bring it into reality in myself and in my organization. Yes, that’s absolutely true. Mary, thank you so much for the work you’re doing, and for sharing it with our listeners. My pleasure.

Unknown Speaker 42:17
Thank