Character is different from personality in that character implies making the choice to act in line with one’s principles
A favourite subject of historians has been great men – occasionally great women – since Homer sang about Odysseus. In the last decades, psychologists and management theorists have focused on contemporary great men – usually CEOs – in order to define leadership characteristics and establish skills inventories for use by HR and leadership development departments. Yet this exercise does not seem to have improved our ability to nurture and select sustainable leaders consistently.
A Call for Character
What exactly has changed? In business we saw last year that, when their philandering became public, sports and popular figures Tiger Woods and NBA star, Kobe Bryant, lost seven-figure sponsorship deals because they were no longer considered role models. Are companies just conforming with superficial public morality and afraid of the media?
[Reprinted with permission from The China Europe International Business School.]