Learning to lead through compassion, integrity, forgiveness and responsibility may be the secret ingredient to leadership success — but being more self-aware must come first.
While robust business acumen is a must for any leader of a large organization, it is only one piece to the leadership puzzle. As any CEO could attest, being a successful leader is much more complicated than it appears. It requires an arsenal of character traits that will never show on a resume and a complexity that reflects more on genetics than on acquired skill.
So how does one develop into a more successful leader?
Perhaps the most important ingredient is what some experts have termed moral intelligence — the ability to lead with four core principles: integrity, compassion, responsibility and forgiveness.
Simple as it may seem, this is where some learning leaders could use refreshing.
Different from moral competence — the ability to know when one is or is not acting morally — moral intelligence means knowing how to lead with these traits. Doing so may not only improve the soft success of a leader, but the bottom line for the organization he or she leads.
This is one of the arguments championed by Doug Lennick, CEO of the Lennick Aberman Group, a performance-enhancement consulting firm that works with executives, leaders and athletes. He, along with co-author Fred Kiel, co-founder of KRW International Inc., a consultancy that works to fix human systems in organizations, published Moral Intelligence 2.0 last spring. The book, which was first published in 2005 and then repurposed with new lessons following the financial crisis, suggests that the key to leadership greatness is leading those four core principles.
“Businesses that are anchored in these four moral principles and have leaders that practice them will return greater value to their shareholders, employees, customers [and] the communities that they operate in than leaders who aren’t. That’s our core assertion,” Kiel said. “We find that in these four, integrity will yield trust from the workforce; responsibility will inspire; forgiveness will promote innovation; and caring [compassion] will gain retention.”
A former executive himself, Lennick is privy to the tendencies that some leaders fall into once they attain positions of power. Leaders stepping into these positions for the first time must learn to be more self-aware.