In 2017, illustrator Dawid Szymczyk created a cartoon for a blog on recruiting that should be hung in HR offices everywhere. In it, a goal-oriented Darth Vader is being interviewed for a community manager position. After reviewing a resume listing all the qualifications and skills that a dark lord of Vader’s calibre would possess, the interviewer concludes he is a perfect fit for the position.

This cartoon generates plenty of laughs when we show it to executives during leadership development programs. But the cartoon has value beyond its humour because it immediately drives home the absurdity of hiring based upon competencies alone.

History and research alike clearly show character impacts outcomes. In addition to helping us see how our weaknesses can undermine our strengths, recognizing the importance of character when hiring and promoting employees can seriously improve decision-making, while ignoring it risks having performance and culture meltdown like Vader’s helmet on the funeral pyre in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.

Simply put, the consequences of focusing on competencies without a similar focus on character can be seen in the 2008 global financial crisis, not to mention the seemingly never-ending individual corporate scandals that routinely destroy shareholder value and threaten stakeholder well-being. And yet, despite all the modern research and ancient philosophic wisdom on the importance of character to effective decision-making, many organizations continue to hire based upon assessments of competence and then end up firing for lack of character.

This makes no sense. So why does it continue to happen? Over the past 15 years, as we have sought to elevate character alongside competence in all aspects of organizations, including selection and advancement, we have observed four types of mindsets that shed light on the conundrum.

• Category 1 – Don’t understand character or know the importance of hiring and promoting for it
• Category 2 – Misunderstand character and hire and promote for it based upon fallacies
• Category 3 – Understand character, but don’t know how to hire or promote for it
• Category 4 – Understand character and know how to hire and promote for it

The first three categories explain why we continue to have a selection problem, and each points to a different set of remedies. The last category is the end game, where organizations don’t just benefit from being able to recognize character and hire and promote for it—they also gain the capacity to implement new systems that drive ongoing character development.

Many organizations are already selecting on character as well as competence. The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), for example, has been doing so for the past five years, and is the subject of an article that we wrote and a podcast we produced to help other organizations understand how to do it.

At the CRA, one key lesson learned is that being able to select on character is dependent on a never-ending process of cultivating awareness of the science of character (remedy to Category 1), while also confronting the common fallacies about what character is (remedy for Category 2) and enabling the ongoing character development of existing employees so they can recognize character in others (remedy for Category 3).

This article examines this process while highlighting the three common mistakes made by organizations embarking on the journey to successfully elevate character alongside competence in all aspects of an organization.

Mistake 1: Over- and under-weighting character dimensions

As noted above, the end game in the journey to elevate character alongside competence is Category 4, where organizations understand character and how to hire and promote for it. Completing this journey improves decision-making while setting a positive tone for the entire workplace culture. But along the way there is a dangerous trap that needs to be red-flagged: most people think character is something it isn’t and underestimate the efforts needed to develop it.

Having helped a professional sports team draft athletes for years, we have been well immersed in sporting world rhetoric—where the word character is tossed around as if it was something as easy to identify as eye colour. It is not.

Think about the proverbial story of six men who have never seen an elephant trying to describe one based upon just the touch of different elephant body parts. The elephant’s side led one to describe a wall while the trunk led another to conclude an elephant is like a snake, and a fan was the description of an elephant based upon the feel of an elephant. Meanwhile, the feel of a tusk, leg, and tail created three other very different impressions (of a spear, tree, and rope, respectively).

When we don’t know that we don’t know something, we operate in a classic blind spot, and like the men in the cautionary elephant tale, people often believe they know what character is while mistakenly equating it with something associated with it, such as having courage or drive. As a result, organizations that think they understand character end up looking for elements of character that can actually operate as a vice in some people.

This is a recipe for high risk, weak performance, and toxic cultures. After all, when selecting and promoting employees based upon misconceptions of character, organizations don’t just risk acquiring people without it—they risk moving individuals with strong character to leave or disengage.

The best way to confront this problem is through awareness of the science of character.

Character has complexities beyond our surface impressions because it is a collection of virtues that, when all present, collectively improve judgment by guiding an individual’s behaviours and choices in positive ways. Extensive research conducted by the Ivey Business School shows it stems from a balance of 11 interconnected dimensions and an associated set of behaviours (see Figure 1) that need to support each other to produce character and positively influence judgment.

Figure 1 – Leader Character Framework

Crossan, Seijts, and Gandz, 2015

Believe it or not, what most people consider signs of character can act as vices when present in an excess state and not balanced by the other elements of character (see Table 1). The key is not to diminish one of your strengths, but to strengthen weaker areas to support good judgment.

Simply put, when making decisions, our ability to trust our own character-based judgment and that of others is what leads to high performance. Imagine a racing car with an exceptional engine but a weak braking system, or a great braking system and weak engine. Both scenarios compromise performance. Now imagine hiring someone with plenty of confidence, courage, and drive, but no temperance and humility.

Understanding the science of character opens the door to hiring for it by getting you past the fallacy trap that keeps many organizations stuck in Category 2. But moving from Category 3 to Category 4 has its own challenges.

Mistake 2: Ignoring personal character development

We have conducted hundreds of workshops around the world aiming to cultivate awareness about what character is and the need to embed it in organizations. We have also produced many podcasts and written works, including two books, on the topic. But for the reasons explained below, we have found the workshops particularly helpful when it comes to enabling people and organizations to move from Category 3 to Category 4.

Table 1 – Character Virtues and Vices.

We originally thought that we could simply relay what we know about the science of character in various mediums to enable people to confidently lead organizations to implement the basic premise that character belongs wherever competence resides. Much to our surprise, we were wrong.

Simply put, we underestimated the challenging nature of driving the organizational paradigm shift required to elevate character alongside competence in hiring and promoting. What we failed to understand is that leading the required organizational paradigm shift takes more than subject matter expertise—it requires a personal paradigm shift as well.

When talking to a medical school that had moved to embed the importance of character in the selection of medical residents, a senior leader admitted being scared about moving forward because they were not sure how to identify character despite understanding the science behind it. This leader needed to move from an awareness about what character is and why it matters, to becoming someone who can confidently recognize it in others, which requires personal character development.

This is where our workshops offer an advantage by allowing us to help participants build the capacity to select on character by developing a personalized program to strengthen their own character that involves daily visits to what we call “the character gym.”

Mistake 3: Not supporting ongoing character development

Some people assume hiring for character is done by asking specific questions. This reveals a lack of understanding of what character is and how it operates because there is no predetermined list of questions that can reveal whether someone possesses character.

Other people think presenting a scenario and inquiring about how a potential hire would react is another way to assess character. But while this technique might help examine an individual’s ethics, it doesn’t provide insight into their character and the factors that have shaped it.

An individual’s character isn’t revealed through their resume, or how they present themselves in an interview as per the Darth Vader comic. Rather, discovering someone’s character is done by exploring who they are and how they have become that person.

This is done via what we call character conversations, which are like peeling the proverbial onion to discover the layers underneath. A detailed look at conducting character conversations can be found in “Make Character Count in Hiring and Promoting,” an MIT Sloan Management Review article by Ivey professor Mary Crossan, one of the authors of this article. But the point we want to make here is that the best preparation for managing a character interview (as either the interviewee or the interviewer) is to regularly work on strengthening your own character.

A lot of people think character can’t be changed. But instead of being static, character can change. It doesn’t shift dramatically like Vadar’s deathbed return to the light side of the force. It tends to strengthen or atrophy over time. But strengthening character requires ongoing work, especially in today’s stressful and divisive world, where virtues like temperance, courage, and drive can erode under the pressures of daily life and toxic influence of social media.

Visiting the character gym

Knowing the importance of character isn’t enough to strengthen it. Just as regular exercise is required to maintain a healthy body, character development requires forming habits that reinforce all the interconnected dimensions of character identified in Figure 1. There are lots of tools that can help people do this, including the Virtuosity app we developed to serve as a personal character development coach. But the first step is always assessing your character.

Look at the 11 character dimensions and associated behaviours in Figure 1. For each dimension, give yourself a number from 1 to 10, with 10 being strong and 1 being weak. Then ask someone you trust to rate you. While doing this, keep in mind that Eurich’s research on self-awareness reveals that 90 per cent of us believe we are self-aware, and only 10 per cent of us are. Also note that there is often a significant difference in how others see us because we tend to judge ourselves on intentions and others on behaviours.

Once you have an assessment to work with, it is time to start hitting the “character gym.” Developing character works through five stages, and the first stage is just starting to observe and identify character in yourself and others. The second stage is about activating it through reminding, priming, and reinforcement. Through our character development work, we have compiled a Spotify playlist offering all sorts of possibilities to activate different dimensions of character with music. The third stage is about exercising specific behaviours. For example, using the “yes-and” improv practice in conversations, we can cultivate being open-minded, part of Collaboration. Stage 4 then connects one character dimension to another to explore how they work together. The final stage focuses on sustaining strength of character across contexts and time.

In as little as five minutes per day, you can accomplish enough honest self-examination to keep character front of mind for positive habit development. But you need a real commitment to making these mental workouts a regular routine. You will also need the courage required to seriously explore how others see you.

Conclusion

Research shows that strengthening character through routine development exercises improves leadership effectiveness while increasing resilience and job satisfaction. But failure to do so doesn’t just lead to missed opportunities for personal growth and professional success—it severely limits your ability to lead a conversation that gets to the bottom of someone else’s character tendencies.

In other words, personal character development is what enables you to identify virtues and vices in others rather than just see bits and pieces of their character. And this is essential to leading the paradigm shift in organizations that opens the door to Category 4.

As Atomic Habits author James Clear notes, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” The systems he is talking about are the collection of daily habits that determine how successful we are at achieving our individual goals. By regularly focusing on making small positive changes to these habits, Clear notes, your chances of reaching goals increase over time.

Organizations also have systems that impact how well goals are achieved by shaping employee character for better or for worse. Unfortunately, too many organizational systems privilege some dimensions of character and not others.

This often leads to suboptimal, if not dysfunctional, outcomes by reinforcing the perilous state of excess vice described above. A notorious example is compensation and rewards systems that are very output- and results-focused with little regard for strength of character, which informs great judgment alongside competence. But by simply recognizing that superior performance and employee well-being arise from elevating character and proactively cultivating its development after the hiring phase, organizations can identify where they over-weight or under-weight specific character dimensions and optimize their systems for long-term success.

May the force of character be with your organization.