Character Counts

The character of an organization’s leader has an effect on the company’s finances, explains Lydia Dishman, in her October 7, 2015 article in Fast Company, "The 4 Leadership Traits that Translate to Business Success."

Dishman reports that “according to KRW International, a leadership consultancy, CEOs whose characters were highly rated by employees had an average return on assets of 9.35% over a two-year period, almost five times as much as CEOs with low scores.

"Scoring emotional intelligence wades into squishy territory...To determine how to rate character, Fred Kiel, KRW’s founder, and his team of researchers combed through a list of 500 behaviors and traits from a classic study of anthropology to boil it down to four universal principles:

• Integrity
• Responsibility
• Forgiveness
• Compassion

"Kiel points out that before he and his colleagues conducted the study, they believed that integrity and honest business practices were all that mattered to bottom-line success. Instead, they found that all four characteristics were needed to get financial returns and boost employee engagement.

"Says Kiel, 'Someone with high integrity but low responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion scores would probably spend all their time micromanaging and would fail to engage the workforce. Integrity isn’t enough, and neither are any of the other three traits on their own. You need all four to achieve virtuosity.'"

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