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Exemplify Exceptional Character

The First Essential of Leadership

What separates leaders who are genuinely trust from those who merely impress? One thing sets them apart: exceptional character.

This episode of Upsize Your Leadership, is the second in a six-part series on the five essentials of leadership. Character, it demonstrates is the essential that makes all the others possible."

Character, you'll discover, is far more than a list of admirable virtues. At its core, character is congruence — the full alignment of three things: what you value, what you say, and what you do.

When these three move as one, you possess what engineers call structural integrity: a framework strong enough to bear up under stress.

On the other hand, when these three fall out of alignment, gaps in character appear — and people notice.

We name the two most dangerous gaps. The first is insincerity, the space between values and words — claiming to esteem what we don't genuinely value. It is the easiest gap to spot and the most damaging to trust.

The second is inconsistency, the space between words and actions — promising what we fail to deliver. It is the most common gap and the most corrosive to credibility.

Even when we believe that we've hidden these gaps, people quietly adjust: they grow guarded, cautious, and slow to take our commitments at face value.

This episode also introduces a powerful idea: character is a fractal. A fractal is a structure that repeats itself at whatever scale that it's displayed. To cite a trite example from baseball, the bases maintain the same lay out, from T-Ball up to the professional ranks, but the distance between bases increases as youngsters grow older.

With character, the same essential structure — values aligned with words aligned with actions — repeats at three scales: the individual leader, the leadership team, and the entire organization. Same essence, three levels.

From this insight emerges the Congruence Accelerator™, the catalyst that frees an organization to excel at agility, speed, and innovation. Nothing slows those forces more than incongruent corporate character. Reducing incongruence in an organization, wherever it's found, removes countless hidden impediments to growth.

Along the way, we explore the surprising Greek origins of the word character — once the name for the die stamp that embossed images on coins — and we draw a vital distinction between character and personality. Charisma may win elections and impress boards, but only character sustains trust over time.

The leader's first duty, then, is to model the way — to be a living microcosm of the values, focus, and conduct you want to percolate throughout his or her organization.

Listen in, and begin building the structural integrity that makes great leadership possible.