Praise for Building Character

“There is no shortcut to building leadership character! However, Gene Klann’s book Building Character is excellent at organizing one’s behaviors and creating awareness of the best practices to achieve your desired character outcome.”
―Keith A. Holliday, vice president, First Citizens Bank

“Klann correctly identifies the learning process for leaders and the necessary tools of leaders in all walks of life. If you want a practical model for leaders and leadership training, read this book!”
―Major General William F. Burns, U.S. Army (Retired);Distinguished Fellow, U.S. Army War College

“One only has to know Gene Klann for a short time to understand how deeply he cares about the positive effects of leadership qualities like character and integrity. When Gene speaks on these topics, I make the time to listen.”
―Michael Kleist, vice president of information engineering, WSI

“Klann’s astute insight into human behavior has been honed through years of real-life experience, from leading our military troops in the front lines to mediating in the corporate board room. His insights are invaluable.”
―Charles Lange, president and CEO, CIGNYS

“Leadership successes, or failures, are the result of moral and ethical choices…the choices of character. All who lead―or want to lead―should open this book and dig in.”
―General Hal M. Hornburg, U.S. Air Force (Retired); partner, Strategic Message Solutions

“Klann courageously confronts key challenges to personal integrity in this politically correct world of the new century with a book that should be read by any individual who wishes to be considered a leader.”
―Lt. Col. Michael J. Barry, U.S. Army (Retired)

Gene Klann is a senior member of the training faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in Greensboro, North Carolina. Prior to joining CCL, he was founder and president of Leadership International, an organization specializing in human relations, training, coaching, and management consulting.

The CENTER FOR CREATIVE LEADERSHIP is a nonprofit educational institution with international reach whose mission is to advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide. From its campuses in Greensboro, North Carolina; Colorado Springs, Colorado; San Diego, California; Brussels; and Singapore, it conducts research, produces publications and assessment tools, and offers a variety of educational programs. The Financial Times has ranked CCL among the world’s top 5 providers of executive education. For more information, visit CCL’s Web site at http://www.ccl.org.

Building Character

Strengthening the Heart of Good LeadershipBy Gene Klann

Jossey-Bass

Copyright © 2006 Gene Klann
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7879-8151-8

Chapter One

Character and Leadership

Who was the best leader you ever worked for?

Why?

Who was the worst?

Again, why?

Take a moment to answer.

As you thought about the first two questions, you probably thought of some good leader you have known and mentally assigned words and concepts like competent, trustworthy, positive, dependable, cared about people, or kept us informed. The memory of a bad leader probably summoned a list of opposites: incompetent (or only marginally capable), pessimistic, didn’t care about anyone else, wouldn’t share information.

For both leaders, you probably remember specific behaviors that you thought were good or bad, and the behaviors probably followed a pattern. Over time, for better or worse, most leaders exhibit consistent patterns of leadership behavior. The pattern shapes their reputation (how they are known and perceived by others), is considered a reflection of their character, and largely determines their standing and status with others.

Leader behaviors that are considered positive and constructive can be attractive and highly influential. The result is greater respect and trust, and stronger emotional connection between such leaders and their employees. These are behaviors that leaders should strive to develop in themselves, in the cadre of leaders below them, and in all their employees.

The word develop raises several questions: Can good leadership be developed, especially insofar as character is concerned? Can an adult’s character be deliberately improved? If so, what attributes of character are most important to focus on in developing better leadership? Finally, are there specific approaches and methods that an organization can pursue?

The answer to all these questions is yes. The aim of this book is to help you, a practicing leader, to further build and develop leadership character in your organization’s leadership cadre as well as in yourself. The book will look at leadership character first and foremost in terms of behavioral patterns that have a positive, consistent, and useful influence on others. Later chapters will lay out a systematic framework for organizing your efforts. They will also provide a number of tools and suggest specific effective methods.

For now, let’s consider a bit more why these efforts are needed, what it really means to lead, and how a focus on behavior makes character development possible.

What’s Currently Missing from Leadership Development

While we all agree that leadership is important, we also seem to agree that there is a problem with the performance of our leaders. The results of a joint survey by Harvard and US News and World Report regarding leaders in the United States confirms this. Of the 1,374 people polled, 73 percent responded that most leaders in the United States are out of touch with the average person, 58 percent felt their leaders cannot be trusted, only 39 percent felt they have high ethical standards, and only 28 percent said they are the best Americans can do (“Poll: A Leadership Deficit,” 2005). Nearly 60 percent of those polled believe the country would be better off with more women in leadership positions. Military and medical leaders got the highest leadership marks, and leaders of the press got the lowest. From this survey one can reasonably conclude that there is a leadership deficit in the United States. Considering the daily international news, it is not unfair to say that there are varying degrees of leadership shortfalls around the world and in many fields of endeavor.

In the course of my own interviews with many leaders in business and other organizations, I have found that while they and their organizations pay a good deal of lip service to the subject of leadership character, they do very little of substance about it. What is done? For example, new employees, including leaders, are briefed by human resources on corporate values and standards of behavior (but after that they hear nothing). A list of company values is commonly posted somewhere in a frame (but never emphasized or discussed). Posters from publishers like Successories focus on character, integrity, and related principles (but hang unnoticed in common areas). There may also be some innocuous rating item regarding integrity on the performance appraisal form-or a course about ethical dilemmas offered by the corporate online training university (but very rarely anything with real teeth or substance).

Beyond that, character development work has traditionally been limited to defining appropriate and inappropriate behaviors in areas such as sexual harassment, diversity and affirmative action, sensitivity training, and employee standards of conduct. Even in organizations that are more advanced, character development has not gone much beyond group discussion on how to handle situations posing ethical dilemmas. The task of defining and instilling moral and ethical attitudes or behaviors seldom gets more than a passing look.

How can these behaviors be defined? What needs to be instilled?

First, let’s draw an important distinction between managing and leading. Although many people know there’s a difference, in practice the two are often confused. But management deals with such tasks as planning, designing, directing, controlling, coordinating, and tracking execution. By contrast, leadership is about motivating, inspiring, encouraging, and influencing people. We lead people and manage things. Real leaders are effective at leveraging and shaping reality with intangibles such as vision, hope, spirit, morale, emotion, enthusiasm, passion, and soul. Good leaders have positive influencing attributes like courage, caring, self-control, optimism, and communication skills. Good management matters, but it is much easier to find or train good managers and administrators than it is to find or train good leaders. Of course, some nominal leaders have only slight impact and influence because, in fact, what they primarily do is manage. But what they miss-and what is hard to find-is a genuine people orientation and the special relational skills that a really effective leader must have.

Leadership has the potential to become your organization’s most valuable resource. Everything new that happens or does not happen in your organization-including any response to change-depends on the quality of your leaders. The success or failure of a company’s vision, products, programs, systems, and processes all depend on leaders’ setting the atmosphere, tone, and example for the entire organization. Exceptional leadership can have a strong, positive multiplying effect. This is particularly true of the organization’s senior leaders, but it is not limited to them. For better or worse and more or less, leaders on every level will affect their sphere of influence.

Really good leadership is a rare and precious commodity-increasingly so as organizations face new complexities and challenges at the global level. The good news is that you don’t need to mine the depths of the earth for great leaders. You can develop the leaders you have.

To Lead Is to Influence

Basketball Hall of Fame coach John Wooden said that a life not lived for others is not a life, and that there is no greater joy than doing something for others (Wooden, 1997). Rick Warren begins his best-selling book The Purpose Driven Life with the words, “It’s not about you” (Warren, 2002).

These ideas go directly to the heart of what it means to lead. Being a leader of character means that life is not so much about what you yourself can accomplish as it is about caring for and behaving so as to meet the needs of others in ways that bring out their best. To lead is to influence. An effective leader possesses the skills and abilities to influence others for the best-prompting, stimulating, motivating, persuading, dissuading, convincing, and encouraging. An effective leader is always thinking, “What impact does my behavior have on others?” “What might others think, feel, or do as a result of what I do?” “Is my behavior effective, ineffective, or neither?” “How can I behave differently to be more influential?”

Of course, a leader’s influence can be positive or negative. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Saddam Hussein possessed the ability to influence, but their ultimate influence was basically self-serving and obviously negative. Others, such as Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Florence Nightingale, also possessed the capacity to influence but used it more positively, focusing on the needs of others and not on themselves.

Effective and positive influence does not usually flow out of simply applying official authority, title, position, or regulations. Often an authoritarian approach is ineffective in motivating others to do what is needed. Effective leaders must develop skills in a range of other more positive ways to influence. In Leadership in Organizations (1989), Gary Yukl lists numerous tactics commonly used to persuade or convince others, among them ingratiating, exchanging (quid pro quo), building coalitions, making inspirational or personal appeals, consulting, legitimizing, and pressuring. Yukl suggests that managers can categorize these tactics as being either positive or negative. For example, pressuring and micromanaging to achieve results (such as frequently checking on a direct report’s progress on a specific assignment) will generally have negative consequences. On the other hand, personal appeals based on a legitimate relationship between leaders and their leadership cadre (founded not just on title or position but also on common interests and values) can achieve significant results.

In the past, leaders were expected to influence their direct reports. Today, however, leaders are also expected to influence their superiors, board members, peers, customers, clients, suppliers, the news media, community officials, political leaders, government regulators, negotiators, environmental authorities, special interest groups, Wall Street analysts, and any number of other stakeholders. To meet these demands of leadership, rank is clearly not enough, and each group requires different tactics to be influenced and led both effectively and positively. Leaders need flexibility and many different skills to communicate credibly and interact with all these parties for maximum results. The principles found in this book address the kinds of influence that extend in all directions.

The idea of leadership as influence also points to a difference between a focus on effectiveness and a focus on success. The difference is not just semantic. Of course, leaders should be successful, but a better gauge is whether they are truly effective in terms of influence. Leaders can be considered successful when they achieve the goals and objectives for which they are responsible-that is, when they “make their numbers.” But suppose that in the course of making those numbers, half the workforce leaves the organization and morale of those remaining is low. Or suppose much greater success was possible if everyone in the organization had really taken part? True effectiveness means using leadership influence to unite the organization’s efforts toward and past any single bottom-line moment. It means achieving goals and objectives in such a way that the team is still intact, morale is high, and people are lined up to get on the team.

By these criteria, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the victorious coalition forces in the first Gulf War, is an excellent example of an effective leader. His victory was one of historic proportion and he did it with less than three hundred U.S. deaths-very literally keeping the team intact. Even one soldier’s death is one too many, but in contrast it was estimated there would be approximately ten thousand U.S. deaths in that conflict.

Focusing on Behaviors

Traditionally character has been defined as “the combination of emotional, intellectual, and moral qualities that distinguishes a person.” It derives from the Greek kharassein-to engrave, inscribe, or sketch. In other words, character means qualities that are internally engraved in people, becoming an integral part of them. These qualities are then reflected in a person’s pattern of behavior. Thus, leaders’ behavior reflects what they stand for and what their core nature is.

Different people see leadership character attributes as more or less fundamental to character behaviors. Frances Hesselbein, founding president of the Drucker Foundation, defines leadership as a matter of how “to be” as a leader and not how to do or say something (Adrian, 2001). On the other hand, when it comes to leading, certainly what we do in the literal sense outweighs whatever we merely say or profess to be true. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Letters and Social Aims, we don’t have to say very much because what we do “thunders” so loudly that no one hears a word we are saying.

Leadership character is all about behaviors. A leader’s behaviors are a combination of attributes: traits, qualities, and skills. Leadership character is defined as behaviors that have a positive influence on others. It is how leaders behave (based on what inner qualities they may possess or thoughts they may cherish) that determines their reputation and good name.

Leadership behaviors refer mainly to conduct in the presence of others: actions, comments, nonverbal signals, and personal mannerisms, as well as general demeanor, deportment, and comportment. Like anyone else, leaders can behave badly or they can conduct themselves properly and suitably. Leaders can display positive and constructive behaviors or those that are negative and destructive. Whichever they display, their behaviors will be understood as a reflection of who they are.

I mentioned early that leaders are viewed according to their overall patterns of behavior. For the greatest leadership influence and impact, consistency matters. Consistency extends beyond the idea of “rising to the occasion.” Leadership character is not just seen in leaders’ behaviors related to crisis, in the presence of stress, or in situations involving an ethical dilemma; it shows up in all behaviors and in everything they do or fail to do. This is crucial point, because we tend to talk in terms of how a leader handled a certain crisis or made a difficult or potentially controversial decision, but what is equally important (or more so) is how the leader consistently and positively communicates, solves problems, makes decisions, resolves conflicts, disciplines others, builds teams, or casts a vision from day to day. Daily and common behaviors tell much more about the character of a leader than the periodic tough decisions do or the way the leader handles the single great crisis of a career.

For leaders, consistency means always reflecting the same basic principles in practice. It means that one’s behaviors conform and agree with one’s past words and actions regardless of pressure, criticism, and advice to do otherwise. It means maintaining the habitual positive behaviors that are key to winning trust and respect and achieving effectiveness overall. It means being seen and known as a pillar of dependability and reliability, not changing or wavering based on opinion polls, internal disapprovals, or external condemnations.

Consistency also implies that a leader’s behaviors and character are not compartmentalized between work and personal life. You are who you are, and that doesn’t change when you arrive at the office or at your own front door. Your character is such that you find consistent standards for behavior in any context. Responsibilities, stresses, and personalities may vary, but your character does not. All the politically correct arguments to the contrary do not change that reality. Behaviors reflect a leader’s character regardless of the context. In every context, your character will be noticed and judged.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Building Characterby Gene Klann Copyright © 2006 by Gene Klann. Excerpted by permission.
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