E145: Virtue and Character Still Matter in Leadership

Speaker A: You can't hack virtue. It can't be optimized. It develops slowly. It develops in each of us through experience, through self awareness, through reflection and choices every single moment. You're not here for the same old same old. You're not here for just tips. You're here because something in you knows it's time to change. Not just how you lead, but how you live. I'm Janet Aioli, and this is the Inner Edge podcast about leadership, self mastery, resilience, and reinvention for a new world era. Real life, whole self. Let's go there. Welcome to the Inner Edge. Welcome back to the Inner Edge. Lately, I've been sitting with something that feels almost, I don't know, not trendy to say, uh, out loud. In this world. We're so obsessed with performance, we're obsessed with image, productivity, optimize, everything. When we talk about character, it feels like an ideal. It feels like something that we don't really even think about that much. We talk endlessly in organizations about skills, about strategies, about metrics, and about outcomes. We measure. So we measure engagement, we track results, we optimize behavior. And I'm not knocking any of that. All of that is important and it has its place. But what I notice in organizations, I notice in the world that we're not spending that much time talking about who we are and who we're becoming in the process of doing all of these things, who we're being while we're doing our, uh, character. Because when you strip leadership or honestly, life down to the very, very core, what we're really asking of one another is simple. Can I trust you? Will you throw me under the bus? Uh, do you have judgment? Will you act with integrity when things get uncomfortable, messy, or unclear? Integrity. Will you respect me and will you respect others? Those questions aren't related really to performance. They're character questions. I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with a senior leader that I work with. He's highly capable, well respected, and by every external measure, very successful. But he was dealing with a situation where a colleague of his had crossed a line, not illegally and not in the way that violated policy or that would get anybody in trouble, but in a way that really impacted respect and trust. And he said to me, I know that, you know, there's nothing illegal here. I just don't feel right, and I don't think the right thing is being done here. So there was no policy to hide behind. There was no playbook for this. It was just looking at character. That's Where I want to go today into something ancient, deeply practical, and at the heart of, uh, what I mean when I'm talking about the inner edge on this show, Modern Leadership. We're very good at control, external control. We put together rules, we put together policies, incentives, compliance Systems. We've got KPIs. And as I said earlier, being clear, all of those things are important and they matter. But you can't manage behavior without developing character. When that happens, ethics becomes something that we perform or we try to show others rather than being internal. People do the right thing, whatever we've defined as the right thing, when someone is watching and when they're not watching, hmm. Hm. They may be doing something else or who knows? Most leadership failures don't happen because people don't know the rules. Think about that. Life failures don't happen because we don't know the rules or what's right and wrong. They happen because we have a lapse in judgment. We lacked restraint. We lack humility, so we focus on ourselves too much. Or we lack courage in a moment where no rule book applied. And so, huh, we lack the courage to stand up for what is right. That leader I mentioned earlier, he didn't need another framework to follow. He needed the inner capacity to sit down with his discomfort, examine his own fears, and act in a way with courage that he could stand behind later, even if it wasn't the most expedient choice for him, and even if it wasn't the most popular thing to do. Virtue ethics didn't come from leadership theory or modern psychology. It's been around as long as humans have been trying to live together across cultures and civilizations. People asked a similar question. And this goes back all the way to ancient Greece, from where I actually grew up and learned all the Plato, um, readings and all the philosophers. And we learned that growing up. And those philosophers always ask the question, what kind of person do I need to be in order to live well with others, with power and with responsibility? So we've been asking these questions for a, uh, very long time. And different traditions have used different language, but the themes over and over again repeat. Wisdom, courage, justice, compassion, restraint. All of these ideas survived through the ages, not because they were lofty ideals, but because they worked. Before we had contracts and before we had compliance departments, societies relied on character. They pointed out that trust mattered, that your judgment mattered, that restraint mattered. So why is it that virtue feels impractical today? That we can't really talk about character as much as because we live in a culture that values speed over reflection, scale getting bigger and bigger, over depth and output, over wisdom. You can't hack virtue. It can't be optimized. It develops slowly. It develops in each of us through experience, through self awareness, through reflection and choices. Every single moment. And as I've always say in this podcast, every single moment we have a choice in what we say, what we do, and how we make people feel. And those choices over time are, uh, who we become. It's our character. And that's what makes it inconvenient in a world that wants quick answers, we want tips, we want instant oatmeal. We don't want to have to spend time on self reflection and thinking about all of these things. But here's the the more complex and uncertain, um, our world becomes, the more we need a strong inner capacity. No policy will ever tell you how to respond when your values collide, when your power starts to distort your judgment, or when your fear drives behavior. That's where the inner edge lives, and that's where the inner edge has been cultivated. What I find fascinating is that modern psychology didn't invent this, it just rediscovered it. Research shows that human flourishing consistently correlates with character strengths like wisdom, courage, humanity, and self regulation. What does that mean? Science simply put language and data around what wisdom traditions have always known. Who you are on the inside shapes how you live and lead on the outside. So we know that. So what does this mean for you and me? It means that the real work that we need to do in leadership and in our life is not just skill building. It's not just just learning how to do something and how to behave. It's character cultivation. It's asking questions like who am I becoming under pressure? What do I default to when I'm tired, when I'm threatened, or when I'm praised? Where do I take the easy route instead of the more difficult wise one? M those are questions that are character questions, not what do I need to do in order to get an end. That leader I mentioned earlier eventually said something that stuck with me. He said, I realized I didn't want to make the decision that made my life easier. I wanted to make the decision that I could live with over time. That is virtue. It's quiet, it's, um, unflashy. It's practical, but it's wise. Virtue isn't about being good all the time. It's about having the inner stability to respond well when things are unclear. In a world that rewards us for performing and for image, character is quiet. It's not loud. In a culture that celebrates knowing things for certain, wisdom is slower. But when things fall apart, personally or collectively, it's character that holds it all together. So virtue and character isn't out, aren't outdated. Virtue and character aren't outdated. They're not naive. And by the way, virtue definitely isn't soft. Virtue and building our character, building virtues is part of the inner edge. And always remember this. Every truth you speak, every boundary you hold, every moment you decide and act on what really matters at the core. That's your inner edge. See you next time.