This article has a very simple point to make. All of us in
business must take our innate ability to assess character and use
it to predict how leaders will shape the character of their
organisations. Mark Loftus, a Director of The Thinking Partnership,
argues that a systematic assessment of character may offer an
elusive edge to the challenge of choosing leaders who will play
their part in creating organisations that people want to work
for.
The hole at the heart of
assessment
Our consultancy, The Thinking Partnership, is founded on two
principles. First, to help our client organisations to be
outstandingly successful at whatever they have set out to do and
second, to create places where people want to bring their talents
and their soul to work. Twenty years of experience has taught us
that the most significant thing an organisation can do to achieve
these things is to choose its senior leaders as much for character
as for competence. This same experience has shown us that concern
for competence has become all-consuming and that the ability to
assess character in a similarly systematic and rigorous way has
been lost, if it ever existed.
Selection techniques have come a long way in the past few decades.
On his retirement from his 38 years as CEO of Hays recruitment,
Dennis Waxman, reflected on the new environment: "Selection is more
professional, egalitarian, with more concern for equal
opportunities and we have moved a long way from the days when a
Personnel Director could 'spot a good chap'. But with this ability
to get square pegs into square holes, something has been
lost."
Most senior people seem to accept that structured assessment, based
around competencies, gives more reliable and objective information.
The explicit nature of role-profiling, candidate specification and
structured assessment provides an obvious logic for
decision-making. It can also offer good cover if ever a decision is
challenged. Yet time and again we are told that the questions
people most want answering about an individual are: "What are they
really like? What makes them tick? What is driving them? Will I be
able to work with them?"
The Thinking Partnership director Philippa Dickenson has for a
number of years been researching the nature of the Chairman-CEO
relationship. This comment is from one of her research interviews -
the Chairman of a major FTSE 100 company, someone seen by many as
one of Britain's most capable Chairmen. "Look for evidence that
they have had experiences that are character building. You can spot
the places in their lives or the incidents that are bound to have
tested them, those can shape your outlook - so if you've gone
through a lot of fire and bullets in the business sense, you
develop an ability to be reasonably shock-proof, to be well
ballasted, to not be blown around, but to be mature and stable. The
reality is you acquire that through experience. Whereas I think the
egotistical person that gets through with a big ego…I sometimes
doubt he has ever really had the formative experiences that really
make for the person who can last the distance."
What is striking in this comment is that this Chairman does not say
that he looks for evidence of particular competencies, and neither
does he talk about particular personality traits. He talks about
character; competence is more or less taken for granted. This is a
conversation which we have seen replicated many times in our work
with senior leaders, both in our leadership coaching work and when
we have been advising on senior executive selection
decisions.
The character traits of
leaders
Since the early part of the twentieth century psychology has played
a major role in developing new approaches to assessing individuals.
From the foundations of measuring intelligence, through more recent
studies of temperament and personality, the study of individual
difference has been a central concern. Progress in these areas is
manifest in today's psychometric testing and questionnaire industry
which, in turn, provides the bedrock for much of the current
approach to assessment. For the most part, however, we have shied
away from facing up to the task of creating a formal framework for
the assessment of character. Assessing competencies is relatively
straightforward, while measuring character is perceived to be
extremely difficult. Yet across history, for as long as mankind has
told stories, the concern has been with character and how character
may be shaped through grappling with fate, seeking to impose will
on the world, or to reach wisdom through acceptance of that which
cannot be changed. The concern for 'a good man' transcends times
and cultures.
This neglect of character is at last beginning to change, led by
Martin Seligman and Chris Peterson's work at the Values in Action
Institute, as described in their book Character Strengths and
Virtues. They started with the great books of human history, such
as Homer, the Bible, the Vedas, the Qur'an, and worked through them
to understand which character traits across history and across
cultures have been universally valued.
The framework they propose is extensive, and encompasses a number
of traits perhaps less immediately relevant to organisational life
such as 'spirituality' or 'appreciation of beauty'. In our own
leadership work we have found a narrower set to be most useful,
encompassing traits such as wisdom, courage, responsibility and
restraint.
For nearly a decade, we at The Thinking Partnership have been
developing our ability to assess these traits reliably.
Additionally, we are always curious about an individual's personal
levels of energy, motivation, drive and appetite for leadership,
through which their character may be manifest.
How to measure character?
Once it is clear what we need to assess, the practicalities of how
to do it can be approached with the same rigour that has been
applied to assessing intelligence, personality and competence. This
means a concern for things such as consistency of rating among
assessors, using coherent scales of measurement, avoidance of
errors or biases, and achieving reliable results through time. The
process is not straightforward, which is perhaps why it has been
avoided for so long. Our concern for rigour has to be balanced
against the pragmatic need to create measurement methodologies that
are respectful both of people and their time and which do not feel
intrusive.
We have decided against the over-use of questionnaires as many are
too specific for our needs, focusing in-depth on specific character
traits. Instead, our core method is now a traditional one - the
conversation, and the measuring tool is equally traditional - human
interaction.
We invite people to talk to us about themselves: about their work,
the challenges and dilemmas they face, about their relationships,
about what motivates them or demotivates them, about their life
when they are not working and about formative experiences. Our
intent is to seek to understand, and perhaps see a coherence that
they may have missed, but also to be alert to lack of coherence, to
parts of their story that do not make sense. We have been applying
ground-breaking research by Professor Peter Fonagy and his team at
UCL on mind-awareness (the underpinning of emotional intelligence).
Careful transcript analysis enables us to track an individual's
awareness of other people's minds - not by what the individual
says, but by how they say it. Our experience is that this kind of
conversation, combined with the use of transcript analysis, yields
abundant insight into character. When combined with benchmarking
against our extensive and growing database, it renders character
reliably measurable.
Not only does this systematic approach increase our ability to make
predictions about leadership effectiveness, but it allows us to
explore connections between character traits. Take, for example, a
client asking for leaders with 'personal presence'. We now know
that a person assessed as strong in this quality is much more
likely to be seen to have other perhaps equally desirable traits
such as 'perseverance' and 'bravery'. Yet they are also much less
likely to show evidence of traits such as 'compassion' and
'integrity', and in turn are likely to be less effective at
engaging people into action. This is not to say that there is an
absence of leaders with both integrity and personal presence, just
that it is the rare person who holds both of these together.
For our clients we can then explore which are the more important
character traits for their organisation. This can lead to a fresh
interest in looking again at candidates who perhaps shone a little
less brightly in the extrovert world of their assessment centres;
character traits which made a striking first impression are not
necessarily those required for a particular position within an
organisation.
Conclusions
First, that it is possible to understand and assess character, and
that it is possible to do this systematically and reliably, as
systematically as any other aspect of an individual. Second, that
when we do this, it adds something very significant to the
assessment process, bringing a deeper level of understanding and
engagement to the assessment. Third, this approach also gives a
greater ability to predict the way in which the character of the
leader will shape the character of the organisation, and in turn,
its ability to survive, thrive and become a place where human
beings wish to engage their talents.
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