Impact Podcast | Can leaders succeed without character?

KANINA BLANCHARD: Exclusive insights, actionable strategies, and ideas that ignite change. You're listening to the Ivey Impact Podcast from Ivey Business School.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Hello and welcome to Dialogue with the Dean, the inaugural series on the Ivey Impact Podcast. I'm Julian Birkinshaw, Dean of the Ivey Business School. And in this series, I sit down with Ivey's renowned faculty to explore their groundbreaking research and discuss some of the pressing challenges and opportunities shaping business and society today.

Today's episode focuses on the very foundation of what we teach here at Ivey: leadership, particularly the concept of leader character.

What does it mean to lead with character? Can you develop character? Is character contagious? To guide us through this conversation, I'm joined by Dusya Vera, Professor of Strategy and the Executive Director of the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership at Ivey, not to mention a key figure in advancing our understanding of leader character.

Dusya, welcome to Dialogue with the Dean. It's a pleasure to have you here.

DUSYA VERA: My pleasure, Julian. Thank you.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: We will start with some basics. We say leader character. Everyone's got an intuitive sense of what that might mean, but how do you define it as an academic? How do you research a topic like character?

DUSYA VERA: So, character is a set of interconnected virtues and habits. And I'm calling them virtues because they help to improve our judgment, and they lead to excellence and to human flourishing. And examples of those virtues and habits are, for example, accountability and integrity and courage and drive and also humility, humanity, temperance, transcendence, justice.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: A lot of people will have thought about leadership in terms of our behaviors and almost like our traits are almost like a personality. Am I an introvert? Am I an extrovert? Are those also part of character, or are you separating out the elements that you just talked about as different from some of the things that we study in terms of behaviour?

DUSYA VERA: So, character are behaviors, they demonstrated us behaviors because we behave on our habits. But you're right. That's another question that comes out a lot about: are you talking about personality? Because I have my own personality and it's hard to change. Personality, it's sometimes people imagine it more as fixed traits, individual differences that are more fixed. But even personality, people also recognize that they are semi stable. So, it's not completely stable. But yes, Psychologists could describe them as a more fixed.

Character is more about this idea of habits, of behaviors that we can develop. And if you look at these character dimensions, how we call them, and character behaviors, for example, conscientiousness, we include conscientiousness as part of being accountable. Because you're accountable, you are responsible, you're very conscientious, and you own your actions on the consequences of your actions. So that could be an example of a little bit of an overlap there. But the majority of character behaviors that we discuss are not personality.

Some of them are also values. For example, justice. You could say I value justice. So when we talk about this a set of interconnected virtues, habits, a little bit of overlap with personality and with values, but the majority can be considered habits.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And the point here, I think, is that this is a departure from the way that most people have talked about leadership for a long time.

And I think Ivey actually has a very distinctive, I would say, centre of competence or point of view on leader character which I think differentiates us from a lot of other schools.

So just remind us the history of this, because I believe this work came out of the financial crisis of 2008. Is that when the work started?

DUSYA VERA: Yes. During the financial crisis, a group of Ivey professors, Mary Crossan, Jeffrey Gandz, Gerard Seijts, supported and encouraged by the dean, Carol Stephenson. They were asking these questions about why we are again in a global financial crisis? You know, all these managers, CEOs, they seem to be very competent. They have business degrees, they have MBAs, and executive MBAs. Why are we, again, in a global financial crisis?

So, they started doing qualitative work. It was workshops, you know, roundtables in the US in Canada, in the UK, and in Hong Kong. And so, the whole research program was 18 months, interviewing and talking to people about this idea of: what about leadership? What is it that led to this failure in terms of the global financial crisis?

And the answers, while they didn't necessarily use the word “character” all the time, like, “oh it's about character,” but they could say things, like, it's the arrogance. It's the arrogance of thinking that you know all the answers and you don't listen to others anymore. It's the lack of accountability. People are not responsible for their actions. We are not holding people accountable. Or it could be it's too much drive. This is like a bulldozer just running over people because of the results orientation and the short-term orientation. It’s the lack of patience, etc…

So, all these things emerged, these behaviours, these dimensions. And then at the conclusion, at the end of the 18 months, the global financial crisis was not a failure of competence, it was a failure of character.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And so, a failure of character ultimately was one of the core contributors to the financial crisis. And of course, a lot of people, as it were, blamed business schools because we were, I mean not Ivey, but all business schools had trained generations of people with MBAs and they were running the banks and so forth.

And so, the natural kind of consequences, can we as business schools actually help people to develop their characters in a much more positive way to avoid this sort of mistake, this sort of crisis happening again?

And I do want to come back before we finish, in this recording to how we teach this stuff, because it is vital to think that not only is character important, but that actually character can be developed.

I also want to come back to the obvious question about character. When we look at some of the big business leaders and the political leaders today, do they have good character? Some of us might well say no.

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JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: I do want to dig a little bit into some of your research, because this podcast is all about showcasing high quality academic research, which actually influences practice.

So, you gave me a couple of your academic papers to look at. We're going to just discuss two of them. We'll put links to them, for anybody who's listening so that they can pick up on them afterwards. The first it's called “Leader Character in Engineering Projects.” And this is with Mary Crossan, our colleague, Ana Ruiz Pardo, and a few others.

Tell us what you studied. Tell us why you studied it and what your key ideas and findings were.

DUSYA VERA: This was qualitative work. It was an opportunity to really engage into a rich case study for a whole year. And part of the team, the authorship team, followed this team, the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers team. It's a long name, and it is a team of students within an engineering faculty. And what they do is build a Formula One race car, and they compete internationally, locally and internationally.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Literally build a race car?

DUSYA VERA Yes. And they compete with it. So, what was interesting is, of course, these students are very competent – you can imagine to build a race car. They are very competent. They're very bright students. And the case was an opportunity to also see how an intervention at the beginning of the season, they had the chance to participate in a character workshop for one day.

And in that character workshop, they worked on all the dimensions of character, but specifically on transcendence.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: What do you mean by that?

DUSYA VERA: Transcendence is this idea about your purpose and your meaning and also a future orientation. And one exercise that they did, and that we also do with our students, is this idea of the story yet to be created – which you have done with us too and with Ivey.  It’s this idea of: what is the headline that you see in five years? In ten years? What are the possibilities?

So, that was one of the exercises that the participants reported later when we interviewed them that was powerful in imagining possibilities.

And then they went forward, after this day of introducing them to awareness of character. You know, what is character? How does that complement our competence? What can we do with our competence now that it's been enhanced by this idea of transcendence and courage and drive and collaboration and humility and humanity and all of that?

So, they went back to their shop and they changed the physical shop to look like a professional race car organization. They looked at their norms and how they were working together, how they were cooperating. They did things that they had never done before that season. And, so this type of organization throughout their track record in these competitions, the maximum position they had ever had throughout the years had been like 50 something in the world. That year, they were in the top ten, and they actually went for the first time to a competition in Europe, in Germany.

So, they the case, of course, it's not so much about the performance of the team, although we mentioned how they did that season, but we were really excited that the case allowed us to talk about character at different levels. So individual level character. So, you have seen in the paper we talk about individual level character, group level character, and then organizational level character.

How do we embed character in organizational repositories, non-human repositories. And we also talk in that paper about processes. So, character activation.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So how do we activate character? You talk about activating character. How do you activate character?

DUSYA VERA: Let's say losing my cool, and I need to activate temperance. Sometimes we need to activate our courage to say something that we want to say.

So, we came with this term of character activation. The other term is character contagion.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Character contagion? Meaning somehow it catches fire somehow, and I exhibit character and others follow suit. Is that right?

DUSYA VERA: Yes. Exactly. And it's for better or for worse. So, good character can be contagious – sorry, not good, but strength of character can be contagious. And also, weakness of character can be contagious. There is that common phrase that summarizes research in the sense that we are the average of the five people we hang out with. There is the peer-to-peer effect. So, we talked about character contagion and how if you activate courage, maybe I activate courage too because I see you now activating that dimension.

And then we talk about character embedding which as I said, is this idea of capturing character in non-human repositories.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Got it. Meaning somehow you build it into the kind of culture, the norms, the systems? And so, and this is particularly relevant, I think you say, because this is a bunch of engineers who are almost by definition, they're kind of technically oriented. Are you saying they almost haven't even thought about these things before your team did a little bit of an intervention and said, here is a way of helping you to think differently about the task you are about to.

DUSYA VERA: Yes. And it's the idea that we can have competencies. We all have competencies. You know, everybody wants to be competent. A bad character impacts how we use those competencies. So, for example, you know, with our students we talk about the competent jerk.

Every organization may have around their own competence jerk. There is results-orientation, and maybe there are even results on the table, but how that person is using the competencies impacts others.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So, you're giving them almost like a language and a way of looking at the world to help them to get over some of those difficult people, and some of those difficult instances, to rise above and to see where they're going and to help them to bring others with them.

DUSYA VERA: Yes. And with the idea of the competent jerk, I'm exaggerating just to make a point, but it's the difference between what we know and who we are. 

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So that's a very important point. What we know versus who we are, and character is all about the latter.

DUSYA VERA: Who we are, and how who we are impacts how we do our job. And how we use our competencies.

So, I have an engineering degree, and when I was a becoming an engineer, everything is about competencies. It's very little about self-awareness, about how your habits are going to impact how you are going to exercise your leadership.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: You know, it's a very good point, and perhaps we'll come back to it towards the end as we get into the teaching and learning. But yes, it's so easy when we're working in a business school to focus on making sure that students know stuff. But, actually, it's just as important that they figure out who they are as individuals, how they relate to others.

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JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Let’s just talk briefly about the other paper: “Character-enabled improvisation and the new normal: A paradox perspective” again co-written with Mary Crossan, our colleague. And this was just coming out of the pandemic, as I understand it.

So just again, give us a, a glimpse into why you wrote this paper and what the key ideas were.

DUSYA VERA: I have been doing research on improvisation for a long time. That was my dissertation topic with Mary Crossen. And improvisation, like character, are sometimes words that are a little bit misunderstood. What is character? What is improvisation?

But the pandemic gave everybody an opportunity to practice improvisation, which is this idea of  either there is a plan, but we have to throw away the plan, or actually, it's impossible to come up with a plan because everything is changing and everything is so ambiguous. So, we were interested in the idea of everybody is improvising, like it or not, because of the conditions that we are living in. And in the past, we had studied improvisation more from the perspective of the context that allows improvisation in organizations, or the expertise. or the demographics, the men or women or whatever characteristics impact improvisation.

But now from this perspective of: who do you need to be right to improvise? So, for a character perspective, you ask if it's about change, who do we need to be to facilitate change? And in these cases where we are needing to work in real time and make changes in real time, who do we need to be to be able to improvise?

So, the paper describes the pandemic as a paradox of the old and the new. And also how the different character dimensions are also paradoxical to some degree, some people may say being driven and being humble sounds paradoxical. Can I be humble and ambitious? The answer is yes. You can be humble and ambitious. But and again, can you be accountable and at the same time be compassionate? And so, character in itself, you could see there are some forces that may look to us as paradoxical, although they are all interrelated. And improvisation is paradoxical in that on the one side you are creating in real time, but you are also building on whatever you know from the past to improvise.

And in that context of the pandemic, which was all about the old and the new. So that was what we are trying to contribute to help managers to realize that in this challenge of improvising in a moment of chaos or pandemic, they also have to think internally in terms of, okay, what do I need to activate? The courage, the humility, the collaboration in these circumstances, the transcendence to be able to see a way out of here and moving that direction

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And so the observation is that the most effective managers, executives going through the pandemic with all that complexity and uncertainty, were the ones who were able to explicitly kind of understand these tensions, and to live with those tensions, rather than kind of choosing the easy answer of being either very, very top down or just sort of facilitating, trying to somehow get a sort of a both/and solution.

Is that right?

DUSYA VERA: Yes. Both/and. That’s a good way of thinking about it.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And of course, the trouble is that that doesn't lend itself to easy prescriptions. I mean, what we're asking managers to do is to be more thoughtful about these tensions and to not just do more of this or more of that, but to somehow try to recognize that their skill is in inviting both forces at the same.

DUSYA VERA: Yes. And, with character development or character prescriptions, like you say, it is a lot about balance. It's a lot about having the self-awareness to think about, how do I achieve balance in these characteristics so that my judgment is this stronger?

 So, if somebody says, “oh, I, I'm already very driven and very courageous, I don't need the other ones.” It’s then the awareness of saying, yeah, but courage and drive in excess, when not supported by patience and humility, they can have you fall into behaviors that are going to hurt your performance and your decision-making.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: It's a nice segue to the next part of what I want to talk about, which is leadership, leader character in the wider world. Because being driven is good, but if you go too far down the road of being driven, you get into difficulties.

And, you know, we can name names. The Donald Trumps and Elon Musk’s of this world are hugely successful in that domain. But I would be hard pressed to say that they have, shall we say, good character? I mean, the way we're describing character is about balance. It's about self-awareness. It's about intentionally trying to steer a path, between two extremes. And neither of them steer that path. They are quite happy to be extreme on a number of dimensions.

So, how do we respond to the critique – let’s do it perhaps in the business world as well as in the political world – that says, you talk a lot about leader character mattering and good judgment and balance. These are all desirable traits. And yet, somehow, we end up with the most prominent leaders who don't exhibit these traits. You know, we end up sometimes with leaders who are not exhibiting any of the advice that we're giving. How do we explain that?

DUSYA VERA: How do we make sense of that? So, I have thought a lot about that. And, let me tell you some of the conclusions in my mind.

Let's start with political leadership, although both are related. But some people could say that voters are not voting based on character. They're voting based on policies - whatever the policy is. Or the economy. They're voting based on thinking about the economy and not thinking about his character.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: So, they're voting for Donald Trump despite his character rather than because of it.

DUSYA VERA: Yes. So, some people may say, “I don’t like him, but I like his policies” or “I don't like him, but I like him for what he's going to do for the economy.” So, basically saying that the character is not going to matter, because the person is going to be able to do what they say, which is the economy or the policy.

So that's one way of looking at it. In terms of priorities when voting, some may vote for character and some are clearly thinking, “you know what? I’m really looking at the other policies because I care about results and I think the results are going to come from these policies that are being described.”

Another way of looking at it is saying voters do care about character, but they care about specific dimensions of character. Some dimensions they associate more with a result, right? So, in this case, for example, definitely drive – our results on day one, I'm going to do this!

Then, for example, authenticity, which is part of integrity. It's only one behavior of integrity; there are other behaviors of integrity besides authenticity. But somebody could say, “I see authenticity. What you see is what you get. I am not pretending to be somebody that I'm not. This is who I am, I am authentic.” So, people say, “Oh, this is an authentic person.”

And for example, in the case of transcendence – which as I mentioned to you, it's about the future vision, the headline in five years, what are we creating – there are a lot of phrases, like “Make America Great Again.” So, with that perspective, it's not that they don't care about character, but it's more that voters associate these aspects of character more with results. And of course, they are not mentioning humility and humanity and temperance and justice and others, which really balance those out so that there is not an extreme. But that’s how I interpret that. It's a matter of valuing perhaps certain things above others.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And I buy that. The fact that Trump's a bigoted and sexist and all those undesirable things is, is all true. And yet there are some of these other qualities which he has, which some people actually find attractive.

So, let's bring it back to the business world now, because clearly politics and business are different in many respects. Voters vote for people for many reasons. Businesses choose chief executives often through very, very different processes. Typically, there's a board and there's a search, and there's at least the intention within the business world that we're trying to get leaders who do exhibit these much more rounded and much more balanced self-awareness.

And that's what we teach. I've taught this and you've taught this to our students. And yet I can still remember classes where I said, “this is what a desirable set of attributes look like.” And some will say, “hang on, what about Elon Musk, what about Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs wasn't a well-rounded, balanced person in any sense at all? Why would we listen to this advice if in fact, the most successful businesspeople are actually incredibly driven, sometimes quite authoritarian, sometimes quite difficult people to work with?” How do we square that circle?

DUSYA VERA: So, Steve Jobs. Of course, that has come out in my classes too. Sometimes, I do point out that he was in Apple twice.

The first time he was kicked out of his own company that he created, and then he did learn something. The second time, I'm not saying that he became the most humble person, but he was different from the first year. So there was some evolution there. Some people talk about the productive narcissist. Can you be a little bit narcissist with some balance of humility there?

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: It's a fair point. And there was clearly a greater degree of self-awareness.

DUSYA VERA: Yes, there was a growth there.

So in terms of him, there's a little bit of this comparison that we can we can describe to students about the first versus the second and his growth as a leader and how he did the second time versus the first time.

One thing that I sometimes point out to students, of course it is an empirical question, I say, “is it going to be sustainable?” So I guess in the case of politics, we will have a one time and a second time. So, we will be able to see if there's the same evolution that we had with Jobs.

But I tell the students, yes, somebody may look very successful now, is that going to be able to be sustainable? Because if you don't listen to others, if you don't hear advice, if you think you have all the answers. At some point you're going to start making mistakes.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: At some point you're going to get it wrong.

DUSYA VERA: Exactly. So that's of course an empirical question. But if you don't listen…

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: No, it’s true. And I personally believe that entirely. In other words, if you are genuinely a bit of a genius – and in their own way, Jobs and Musk are/were geniuses – then you can afford to get by with some of these character flaws. But most of us are not. And so, the advice to students is: you should be playing the percentages game, which is that you are not the smartest person in the room and therefore a leadership style which brings people with you and listens to them as well as you having the opportunity to bring your own views is more likely to work than believing that you are correct 100% of the time.  

DUSYA VERA: And the other facet to add to that is also the definition of success.

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JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: We must wrap up, but one last question: If we want to give a little bit of advice, one or two very specific points to finish, to the student or for that matter, the relatively junior executive who wants to take leadership character seriously, what should they do?

DUSYA VERA: So, I think that everything starts with the awareness that leadership is not only about leading others and about leaving organizations, but it's about leading the self.

Then the second step is this idea of what is character and how it will make my competencies even better. I could be just competent and have some level of performance but it’s this entanglement. So, reading about what character is and then deciding what is the most uncomfortable part of my job right now? And knowing that that is where they're ripe for growth.

So, I think that's a starting point: this awareness and this recognition of I can develop this, there are exercises, habits can be developed. You know, Atomic Habits, the book, it's very popular. And a lot of students know that book in terms of this is how we can develop a new habit. The difference is this is a habit of character versus a habit of playing the guitar. But it is a habit that can be developed if you practice. We just need to practice and exercise.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: And, linked to what you just said, every strength I have is also potentially a weakness if I take it too far. Somebody who's driven, I'm proud that I'm a driven person, but actually kind of watch out because if you drive too hard, you…

DUSYA VERA: Yes. And the research shows that it's not about becoming less driven. The drive can stay there. It’s about bringing the other ones up. So, it's not that oh my goodness, are you telling me that I have to be less driven and less courageous? No, you are fine, that’s a strength. But it could become a vice if you don't bring your humanity, your empathy up.

JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: Thanks for that. That's terrific advice.

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JULIAN BIRKINSHAW: You've been listening to Dialogue with the Dean from Ivey Business School. A big thank you to my guest, Dusya Vera, Professor of Strategy and the Executive Director of the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership, for sharing her insights and time today. And of course, thank you for tuning in.

On our next episode, I'll be joined by Fredrik Odegaard, Associate Professor of Management Science, for a thought-provoking discussion on artificial intelligence and its impact on business strategy and operations. Be sure to listen in as we explore how AI is shaping the future of business. Until next time, goodbye.

KANINA BLANCHARD: This was Dialogue with the Dean and I the Impact Podcast series. For more insights from Ivey, including thought leadership on critical issues and additional podcast episodes, visit IveyImpact.ca or subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Thanks for tuning in.