Seeing How Character Eats Culture For Breakfast

Forbes

22-05-2025

Why has it been so difficult for organizations to realize the aspirational culture they seek? In a recently published article, 'Diagnosing and Implementing a Character-Based Culture,' Bill Furlong, Corey Crossan, and I describe four vexing challenges organizations encounter when attempting to define, shape, measure, and sustain an aspirational culture. Simply put, seeing these obstacles through the lens of character not only diminishes the 'fog' of culture, it provides insights, approaches and tools to intelligently and intentionally develop the culture organizations need to enable their chosen strategy.
Seeing and understanding the influence of character is akin to putting on a set of glasses to see culture more clearly. Roughly speaking, 90% of what every organization seeks in their aspirational culture is represented in the middle column of Table 1. The other 10% is the nuance that comes from strategy, such as having a service or safety culture. The problem is that the realized culture of most organizations is represented by the left- and right-hand columns. In our article we describe how the micro-foundations of character can operate in under-weighted and over-weighted states, undermining the aspirational culture that most organizations seek. Aspirational culture, regardless of strategy, can be directly tied to the strength of character of people, particularly the leaders. Essentially, culture reflects character.
Extensive research at the Ivey Business School and around the globe has brought clarity to what character is, how to assess and develop it, and embed it in organizational practices. When it comes to culture, Table 1 captures the essence of how culture reflects the dimensions of character as under-weighted, strong, or over-weighted.
Table 1 - Character and Culture
Crossan & Crossan, 2021
Individuals can readily identify the statements that best describe the culture of their unit or organization. Most find themselves on the left 'under-weighted' column, which is the aggregation of deficiencies in a dimension of character, and/or the right 'over-weighted' column, which is an aggregation of excess. The over-weighted column merits explanation. It means that individuals in the organization have significant strength in a dimension, such as accountability, but that strength is not supported sufficiently by other dimensions, leading to 'difficulty delegating; obsessive and controlling; little room for learning from failures.' Without exception, our workshops reveal that individuals would be delighted if their culture reflected the 11 statements in the middle 'strong' column, which is why aspirational culture is founded on character.
People grasp the logic that these descriptors mirror a similar set of descriptors at the individual level, which is when the proverbial lightbulb goes on. They realize that culture reflects their character. And if they want to transform culture, they need to strengthen their character. For example, an executive with strong accountability realized that because his temperance and humility were weaker, his accountability was manifesting in the over-weighted excess state, characterized by being obsessive, controlling, burdened, and unable to delegate. He grasped that his behaviors were fostering weaknesses in accountability among his subordinates, causing them to become less accountable. All of this leading to behaviors in the left and right-hand columns of the table.
Although there are many cultural diagnostics, often pointing to some of the behaviors in Table 1, the lack of a coherent understanding of the architecture of character and how to develop it has crippled organizations as they seek to diagnose and transform culture.
Building on the analogy of the glasses, the visual acuity associated with character arises through its development, not simply reading about it. The challenge with character is that most of us think we have clarity. However, there is significant danger in believing we have character covered, only to discover that we have substantial blind spots. It is this lack of clarity that leads to the left- and right-hand column behaviors. As a sort of vision check to help identify character blind spots, Corey Crossan and I created the Character Quotient (CQ) questions in my Forbes article, 'From Good to Great: 10 Ways to Elevate Your Character Quotient.' The QC score comprises three categories related to the 10 questions: awareness, development, and application. A high QC means that a person is aware of the interconnected dimensions of character and how they can operate in a deficient and excess state, they can observe and identify that in themselves and others, they have an evidence-based daily habit development program to strengthen their character (we call it going to the character gym), and they can confidently apply character to areas such as selection, performance management and culture transformation.
Although cultivating a high QC score is a work in progress (mine is 87% even though I have worked in this space for 15 years), it provides a reasonable measure of the confidence we can place that we understand character, are actively developing it, and applying it in our organizations. There is clear evidence-based science about what character is and how to develop it, which becomes the solid foundation on which to engage the journey of individual development, taking into account the recursive relationship between the individual and their context. A great example of this is revealed in the Virtuosity Podcast between Corey Crossan and Dr. Christian Breede, a Research Analyst with the Department of National Defence, working at the Canadian Defence Academy. In the podcast, he describes his journey of character development and how it manifests in his personal and professional life. He describes that he has cultivated a better understanding of what character is, how to develop it and apply it in his context. In the podcast, Breede reflects on character in combat, saying 'Character work is not to be started in the attack position. You've got to do it before…You gotta have the sets and reps done beforehand so that when you're in those positions of having to make a quick decision, you can rely on your strength of character – your judgment is strong and you're going to make the right call.'
With clarity about what character is, how it can operate in deficient and excess states, and efforts to develop it, individual character scales to organization culture. It does so through the micro-moments of conversations and actions, which reflect and shape character. This is the essence of the famous quote by Gandhi: 'You must be the change you want to see in the world.' With great respect, I would suggest we consider that the word 'be' is best understood as 'become.' When it comes to character, we are always becoming someone with more or less courage, humanity, humility, drive, and so on.
The development of character involves the intentional practice of strengthening one's character, with the ultimate test being whether it holds up in various contexts, including organizational reward systems that could undermine character-based judgment, under time pressure, and adversity. This was the argument I made in my Forbes article 'Strategic Resilience and Agility: 4 Ways to Thrive in a Chaotic World.' The development of character underpins organizational agility, which underpins strategic agility. Will leaders navigate today's generational challenges of economic upheaval, geopolitical volatility and accelerating climate change through doubling down on technical or management competencies alone? Of course not. Success, or lack thereof, will reflect our leaders' judgment and decision-making, which is rooted in leaders' character.
A good test of strength of character vis-a vis context is whether individuals blame the organization or the broader system for their decisions and actions. A classic example is blaming compensation and reward systems, or blaming the pressure for performance, whether that be from capital markets or other mechanisms. Although we can't ignore these pressures and influences, character-based judgment brings the needed 'practical wisdom' to operate in complex scenarios without resorting to being a victim of them.
Furthermore, while today's extraordinary context challenges character, individuals with strong character-based judgment have the potential to shape that context. An example of this is how Sonja Coté from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) embraced the opportunity to elevate character alongside competence in their executive hiring practices. Then, when the pandemic arrived in 2020, CRA was capable of delivering emergency financial relief to millions of Canadians amid an unprecedented health crisis, one of the first signs that the pandemic could indeed be managed.
There is a clear case that the development of character is a critical underpinning of culture, but there is so much more. Seeing, experiencing, and applying the development of character to culture will open the door for seeing many more possibilities, both personally and professionally. Regardless of the challenge or opportunity, the foundation of character will remain critical.
The logic for why character is indispensable is clear, as is the evidence. In 2015, Fred Kiel wrote the book 'Return on Character: The Real Reason Leaders and Their Organizations Win,' paving the way for extensive empirical work exposing how the foundations of character influence a variety of key performance indicators. In 'Cracking the Code: Leader Character Development for Competitive Advantage,' Corey Crossan, Bill Furlong, and I share the extensive research conducted at the Ivey Business School, which demonstrates a correlation between character and leader effectiveness, resilience, well-being, promotional potential, and numerous other key performance indicators.
The famous saying 'all roads lead to Rome' aptly describes character. Think of it as the bedrock, the DNA, or the cornerstone of many things, including culture. Essentially, wherever competence resides, character belongs. The greater the competence, the more need for character to harness it. Investments in character development yield benefits for cultural transformation, as well as numerous other benefits related to well-being and sustained excellence. An example of this is revealed in the article my co-authors and I published in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management 'Leader Character in Engineering Projects: A Case Study of Character Activation, Contagion, and Embeddedness,' where we describe the year-long activities of a University Formula Race team, revealing how character can change how competencies are enacted.
The bottom line is that character development is indispensable and should be the first point of consideration, given its foundational influence. It not only eats culture for breakfast, but virtually everything that matters to us personally and professionally.