Ignoring character can lead to leadership failures, says academic, offering tips on how companies can develop and assess it effectively
Organizations often fall into the trap of prioritizing competencies over character when hiring or promoting leaders, according to Gerard Seijts of Ivey Business School’s Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership.
The challenge, he says, is that character is harder to assess than competencies, which can be measured through past experiences, qualifications, and technical skills.
“We hire people based on competencies, but, more often than not, we let them go based on character-related shortcomings,” he explains. “Challenges as a team member, lacking in self-control, not very humble, questionable judgment.”
Ignoring character, however, has consequences. Seijts recalls the aftermath of the global financial crisis when the Ivey Business School held roundtable discussions to understand what had gone wrong.
“We asked, as a leading Canadian business school, what happened here? Help us understand from a leadership point of view,” he says. “And the biggest surprise was that people wanted to talk about character.”
At the time, character was considered a vague, subjective concept. There was no common vocabulary for discussing it in leadership contexts. Some people thought character is akin to personality – which it is not.
That realization led Seijts and his colleagues to develop a framework that identifies 11 dimensions of leader character—qualities such as accountability, humility, temperance, and judgment. Some have questioned the need for 11 dimensions, suggesting a simpler model would be easier to apply. But Seijts pushes back against that idea.
“The 11 dimensions all work together to produce good outcomes, to facilitate good judgment. And what we all want from our leaders is good judgment,” he says. “If people say, ‘I’m going to work on my courage, my drive, and my accountability,’ I say, ‘Fine. But in the absence of temperance, restraint, a bit of self-control, you may get reckless behaviour.’”
That, he says, is what happened during the financial crisis. Organizations valued leaders who demonstrated drive and accountability but often failed to recognize the dangers of excessive risk-taking without self-restraint.
Another common leadership pitfall is groupthink, which Seijts attributes to a lack of courage and accountability in decision-making. Effective leadership, he argues, requires a balance—challenging ideas while also demonstrating humanity and compassion.
“If you have too much collaboration, you get groupthink,” he says. “In order to get along, we just go along.”
Character is not fixed, Seijts insists. Unlike personality traits, which remain relatively stable, character can be developed through intentional effort, or deliberate practice. The goal is to cultivate behaviors that contribute to individual well-being and eventually a stronger, well-functioning society.
“We take a behavioural approach,” he explains. “Character is about the behavioural routines, patterns of behaviour that are anchored in virtues as well as particular values and personality traits.”
When it comes to hiring, many organizations still struggle to assess character effectively. Seijts points out that even when companies recognize its importance, they often don’t know how to identify it in candidates. This leads to hiring decisions based on past achievements rather than deeper indicators of how a person will lead and interact with others.
“The first mistake is that people just don’t look for character because they don’t really know what it means,” he says. “It’s too subjective hence they just recruit on competencies.”
One of the biggest character deficits he encounters in leaders is a lack of temperance. This, he believes, is partly because organizations don’t emphasize it in leadership development. Instead, they focus on drive, accountability, and integrity—important qualities, but insufficient on their own.
“It’s a running joke,” he says. “When we assess leader character through self- and 360-degree assessments, temperance—self-control, restraint, and patience—is almost always a deficiency in leaders.”
Leadership development programs, Seijts argues, should focus more on cultivating a balanced character. He points to the importance of candour, which he sees as a critical part of integrity. It takes courage to deliver hard truths, but it must also be done with compassion, an element of the dimension of humanity.
“People talk a lot about candour in conversations—radical candour, fierce conversations—but no leader wakes up one morning saying, ‘I’m looking forward to telling someone they didn’t get the job.’ These are the most difficult conversations,” he says. “Candour does not mean that you can be mean-spirited, a jerk; it needs to be delivered with empathy and understanding.”
Over the past 15 years, he has seen organizations become more willing to engage in discussions about character.
“Outreach as an educational institution is really important,” he says. “We work with a great number of organizations in the public, private, and non-profit sectors to actually have these conversations around character. And I think, slowly, it will have an impact.”
