Why Good Character is Essential for Great Leadership

The current political climate in the United States has brought into clear view the importance of candidates being of good character, and the perils of choosing ones that are of "bad" character.

What is Good Moral Character?

In U.S. law , good moral character can be assessed through the requirement of virtuous acts or by principally evaluating negative conduct. Legal judgments of good moral character can include consideration of honesty, trustworthiness, diligence, reliability, respect for the law, integrity, candor, respect for the rights of others, absence of hatred and discrimination, emotional responsibility and respect for the U.S. Constitution and finally, the absence of a criminal conviction.

Using those criteria, a number of righ ranking current and potential politicians in the U.S. do not pass the criteria for good moral character. That fact presents a significant danger to the viability of the U.S. as a democracy.

Bad Character in Business

“Is America Turning Into a Banana Republic?” is the question posed by Robin Wright in an article in The New Yorker.?According to her, “the main tenet of ‘banana-ism’ is that of ‘kleptocracy,’ where people in positions of power use their time in office to maximize their earnings, always making sure that any shortfall is made up by those unfortunates whose everyday life entails earning money rather than producing it.” She concludes that the United States satisfies those criteria.

In the book Intrinsic CSR and Competition, edited by W. Wehrmeyer et al., Mathias Schüz of the School of Management and Law at Zurich University claimed that “there is a comprehensible cause-effect loop between the virtuous behavior of a company, its trustworthy reputation, and appeal to stakeholders.”

According to Schüz, the absence of ethical awareness among senior managers is a common occurrence in business. He claims that ethical leadership is frequently requested but infrequently provided.

According to Schüz, investing in training programs to foster moral behavior will pay dividends for both individuals and companies. “Integrity” is a virtue that allows one to act morally upright in a given circumstance while keeping in mind their capabilities. According to Schüz, moral behavior promotes self-responsibility and excellent character rather than relying solely on compliance-based ethics of responsibilities. Hundreds of laws and tight compliance processes, he contends, only serve to increase distrust and denunciation. They ought to be diminished, and integrity-boosting initiatives ought to be added.

Professor Sumantra Ghoshal submitted an article for publication in the journal Academy of Management Learning and Education just before he passed away at the age of 55. The piece contains harsh criticism of business education initiatives.

It was included in the magazine together with a piece by Stanford University’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, a leading management researcher in the US and one of the publication’s most vehement critics of business schools.

Business schools merely need to avoid doing a lot of the things they already do, according to Ghoshal: “Business schools do not need to do a great deal more to help prevent future Enrons,” he wrote, “Many of the greatest excesses of contemporary management techniques have their origins in a collection of notions that have arisen from business school academics over the previous thirty years.”

Business schools are specifically targeted for criticism by Ghoshal due to the “dehumanizing influence of contemporary economics on management thought.”

In response to his article, “Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices,” Pfeffer, Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School, Donald Hambrick of Penn State University, John Gapper of the Financial Times, Lex Donaldson of the Australian Graduate School of Management, and Henry Mintzberg of McGill University are among the top management theorists who provided comments.

Pfeffer strongly concurs with Ghoshal’s criticism of economics: if anything, Pfeffer claims, “he [Ghoshal] understates the potential negative consequences of the expanding dominance of economics over the social sciences.” As it has done with political science and law, Pfeffer says, as it is doing with sociology and psychology, economics is undoubtedly displacing management and organizational science.

For shareholders to benefit from limited liability, Ghoshal contends that they “do not own the company – not in the sense that they own their homes or their automobiles.” Additionally, he claims that “the majority of stockholders can sell their stocks much more easily than the majority of employees can find another job.” Employees of a corporation incur more risks than stockholders do in every meaningful sense.

The majority of well-known management theories place little emphasis on the social and moral principles necessary for effective administration, instead favoring considerations of self-interest and opportunism. The fa?ade of knowledge, in Ghoshal’s words, “has caused us to increasingly focus on the negative problem as a result of which we have made little analytical progress on the positive problem in the previous thirty years, at enormous expense to our students, to companies, and to society.”

Ghoshal and Pfeffer contend that business schools should place greater emphasis on “the wisdom of common sense” rather than on mathematical models that are friendly to science.

Economics is a “neat and tidy” field, Rosabeth Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business School adds, “People are messy. The theories Ghoshal criticizes have a scientific, analytical, and statistical bent that makes them appear difficult, but in reality, in practice, the so-called soft concepts, which hold that management is an art involving people, are much tougher. Executives state that. MBAs from Harvard Business School concur. And after five years, they frequently regret not enrolling in more people-focused courses instead of finance courses.”

Virtuous Leaders

The following is an excerpt from my new book, Virtuous Leadership: The Character Secrets of Great Leaders.

The relationship between character traits, virtues, and happiness was thoroughly investigated by Denise Quinlan, Nicola Swain, and Dianne A. Vella-Brodrick in their article published in the Journal of Happiness Studies.They also looked at the effects of lacking leadership virtues.

They claim that if you think about what might occur when leaders lack these qualities, the repercussions become more apparent. They argue the following:

? Without good judgment leaders frequently make poor decisions, particularly when they must respond fast in unclear circumstances, such as when they are presented with the numerous paradoxes that occasionally face all leaders.

? Without humanity, leaders are unable to empathize with others, view things from the perspectives of their followers, or consider how their decisions may affect other people. Without humanity, leaders will act in ways that alienate people rather than in ways that are socially responsible.

? Without a sense of justice leaders are unable to comprehend the problems with social inequality and the difficulties of fairness without a sense of justice. Such leaders take unjust measures that result in poor employee relations or negative responses from the public, the government, and regulators. People will resist and try to remove the leader in various ways.

? Without courage, leaders will be unable to confront others’ poor choices and will lack the tenacity and determination needed to resolve challenging problems. In addition, when faced with difficulty, they will back down and take the simple path. But they only delay what will happen as a result.

? Without collaboration, leaders will be unable to accomplish important objectives that call for more than just one person’s abilities and commitment. They don’t make better decisions or carry them out better by utilizing the diversity of knowledge, experience, views, judgments, and talents of others. Relations worsen as a result of friction between various interests.

? Without accountability, leaders cannot persuade people to commit to or take ownership of their decisions. They create a culture of fear and disengagement by blaming others for bad outcomes. People cease caring, which could have terrible repercussions.

? Without humility, leaders are unable to be open-minded, solicit, and take into account the opinions of others. They are unable to grow as leaders as a result of reflecting critically on their mistakes and learning from those of others. They resemble cartoon versions of themselves. It leads to isolation.

? Without integrity, leaders are unable to forge strong bonds with subordinates and superiors within their organizations, or external allies, or partners. Every assurance must be provided, which causes mistrust and slows down choices and actions.

? Without temperance leaders take unwise risks, jump to conclusions, neglect to obtain relevant information, lack perspective, make frequent and detrimental changes, and even go back on crucial decisions. They lose credibility.

• Without transcendence, leaders’ objectives become constrained and they are unable to move conversations to higher-order objectives. They lack perspective, thus their choices might merely be motivated by opportunism. They don’t inspire others to think creatively or unconventionally.

Here's an important partial list of virtues that constitute good moral character in leaders.

You can read more about virtuous leaders of good character including an action plan in my book Virtuous Leadership: The Character Secrets of Great Leaders.