Contributor: Ali Ahmed

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he has taught since 1979.   He is the author or co-author of 14 books on topics including power in organizations, managing people, evidence-based management and author of more than 150 articles and book chapters. Professor Pfeffer has won numerous awards for his scholarly research.  He spoke with Stew Friedman about his just released book, Leadership B.S.:  Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time and what changes are needed in the “leadership industry.”

Stew Friedman: When I was in graduate school a fellow student referred to the articles we were reading in the premiere journal in our field, which is the Administrative Science Quarterly, as the “Administrative Science Pfefferly” to connote that in every single issue there was another profound article by Jeff Pfeffer. It’s a really great feeling to have him on the show.

Jeff Pfeffer: It’s a pleasure to be with you, Stew, and it is just a privilege to be talking to you this evening. Also, I’m privileged to be a signatory on the petition signed by many academics in favor of paid family leave. I think your work on the work family issue has just been outstanding, and it’s so important to make workplaces work for everybody.

SF: That’s really very gracious of you, and means a lot. You’ve been casting a keen and critical, evidence-based eye on organizations for so long, particularly on leaders. I’m curious to know, first, what inspired you to write Leadership BS? What has emerged recently that you just couldn’t ignore?

JF: That’s a great question because I had       not really ever intended to write this book or this kind of book. But the amount of hypocrisy and the cynicism that that hypocrisy spawns is just striking. You see these leaders, they come to Stanford and I’m sure they come to Wharton. They tell wonderful stories about themselves, and about how they would like to be seen and presented, which bear almost no resemblance of the realities of how they lead and how they conduct themselves.

SF: And everybody knows that, right?

JF: And everybody knows that. It provokes an enormous amount of hypocrisy and cynicism. In fact, as I began to think about this, it occurred to me that we have had decades – maybe five, or six, or seven decades – of this leadership industry talking about aspirational views of how leaders ought to be.    And I agree that leaders ought to be modest, authentic, they ought to tell the truth, they ought to do many things. But of course when you look at real leader behavior, it’s pretty much the opposite. And when you look at the condition of workplaces, not only in the U.S. but around the world, they’re in pretty dire shape. And so it occurred to me that the leadership industry had not only failed to make things better, but that by telling these stories that bear no resemblance to reality and having this kind of aspirational, feel-good quality to then, it was not doing anything to cause anybody to get off their butts and try to do anything to make the world of work better. And so it occurred to me if anything was ever going to be better, somebody had to look at what was going on and tell the truth about it.

SF: And you draw the very useful analogy to medicine a hundred years ago.  Explain how you came up with that idea and how it helps us to understand the argument you are making.

JF: We’ve known for hundreds of years that hygienic practices are important in preventing hospital-acquired or iatrogenic illnesses. And so we’ve done the studies that have shown that hand-washing is good for preventing illness.  Nonetheless the medical industry has done something the leadership industry has never done, which is to say, “We know hand-washing is a good thing, but let’s look and see how many doctors really wash their hands.”  When they found that many of them don’t wash their hands, instead of having more stories, or more admonitions, or inspirational talks, they looked at what interventions they might use that would cause doctors to do some of the things they ought to do, such as better hand-washing and other hygienic regimens.  The leadership industry does not have base rates. All these desirable leadership behaviors are occurring, and because we never measure the base rates, we can never evaluate any interventions as to whether or not those interventions are making things better or worse.  If you fail to do that, nothing is ever going to get better because if you don’t know if you’re getting better, you don’t know the success of what you’re trying to do.

SF:  What would it require to measure base rates? What would we have to do to establish that?

JF: First of all, the leadership industry needs to define the constructs more precisely. A chaired professor at Duke University, somebody who you probably know, Sim Sitkin, has written a very nice review on what’s wrong with charismatic leadership. And one of the problems with charismatic leadership is that the construct is defined in a way that makes it almost un-measurable.  But I still think you can define precisely what you mean by servant leadership, by serving others, by authenticity, and so on. The first thing you do is measure the frequency of such characteristics in the populations you’re using. If you’ve found, and this would be my guess, that they’re relatively rare, especially among senior leaders, then you need to ask the question, “why is that?” Why are desirable qualities that research has shown do lead to healthier and more productive workplaces, why are they so rare among leaders? And what might we do to increase their frequency?

SF: So, employee engagement and trust is low in the world today — in business and in societies, as you point out.  Aside the impact that improved leadership performance might have, what else do you see causing the problem of disengagement and low trust?

JF: Well, I think leader behavior is one source. I participated once on a panel in restoring trust in leadership with Mr. Edelman, the head of Edelman who does the trust index in public relations to restore trust. I’d do that by stop whining to people, which of course has gone on.   Companies increasingly see their employees not as assets, but as costs that have to be minimized, and so you have fewer employees being employed full-time. Fewer employees are getting health insurance from their employer than ever.  Companies have cut wages, they’ve cut benefits, they’ve laid people off over the years. All of this would lead to not just lower employer engagement, but adverse health consequences for employees who face enormous levels of economic insecurity and difficulties in accessing healthcare.

SF: Do you see this fraying of the relationship between labor and management as something that is increasing?  Where does leadership play a role in trying to strengthen the connection that employees do have or can have to their organizations and to their own personal health and their families and their communities?

JF:  The relationships are certainly fraying. As your colleague and good friend of mine, Peter Cappelli, has said in his book, New Deal at Work, and in the subsequent research, there’s a lot of data that suggests that job tenures are going down, and that the percentage of part-time and contract laborers has gone up. And as I’ve already alluded to, benefits are going down. There is certainly a lot of fraying of the relationship. Research done by our colleagues in the human resources management area, such as by Tom Kochan at MIT, has demonstrated that these are strategic choices made by companies. You do not have to outsource, downsize, or pay people nothing, in order to be successful. When Cascio did the study comparing Sam’s Club to Costco, he found that Costco is more profitable even though it pays more and offers more benefits. The so-called high road approach dealing with your work force has been written about by Tom Kochan, and Paul Osterman, and by a variety of people over the years. This is a strategic choice that some leaders have and it’s a choice that is motivated in part by the idea that people are indispensable. It’s interesting to me that we are very concerned with environmental pollution, and companies now report their environmental bona fides, how much carbon they emit in the atmosphere, how much recycling they do, and so on and so forth. I keep pointing out to people that in addition to environmental pollution, we ought to be concerned about social pollution.

SF: How would you do that?

JF:  It turns outs that there is a single item measure of self-reported health (SRH). It basically asks people on a scale of 1 to 10, how good they feel, from feeling horribly to feeling very good. And this prospectively predicts mortality and morbidity. And it does so almost as well as physiological measures, such as body mass index and so on and so forth.

SF: That’s easy to acquire – that information.

JF: It’s very easy to acquire. Part of this is we need companies to measure health data of their employees. Second, just as we now hold companies responsible for their environmental impact, I think we ought to hold companies responsible for their impact on the wellbeing and welfare of their work force. I mean Gallop, as you know, has partnered with Health Ways, and they do their wellbeing index, measuring how that varies across geographies, and so on and so forth.  That’s also very interesting data for us and another way of measuring this. But we ought to be concerned about human wellbeing. As I know, you are doing at the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project.

SF: I’d like to try to bring this back to what you have composed here in critiquing the leadership industry. There seems to be a missing link between what we are aspiring to produce in our leaders – which is people who can take us to a better place – and what we’re actually producing. We’re not really emphasizing enough what’s required to create a leadership cadre of people who are dedicated not just to economic outcomes, but to human and social outcomes as well.

JF:  That’s exactly right. And it’s one of the conundrums I have highlighted in this book, Leadership B.S, but which I have not been able to solve.  Here’s the dilemma: the qualities that we claim we want in leaders – modesty, authenticity, telling the truth, taking care of others, etc. – are precisely the opposite of the qualities that actually make people successful. And by successful, I mean we know that narcissism (which I would argue is the opposite of modesty) has been reliably shown to be predictive of getting chosen for leadership roles, maintaining those roles, getting higher salaries, getting more successful, and some of the most successful leaders are narcissists. Michael Maccoby wrote this wonderful book called, The Productive Narcissist and talks about that.   The irony is then, there are a lot of reasons ranging from sociobiology to social psychology that explain this, but the qualities we claim that we want to see in leaders are exactly the opposite of the qualities we seem to be selecting for and exactly the opposite of the qualities that bring people individual success. So, there is individual success, which is often earned at the expense of the organization or social system’s success, and that is a conundrum or dilemma that denies so many.

SF: So, please go further with this issue of the disconnect between what we aspire to and what we do.  What ideas do you have for what organizations and individuals in organizations can be doing to ensure that they can start to produce those kinds of leaders that we would hope for as well as those that we actually see in the world today?

JF: Some years ago, when I used to write columns for Business 2.0 when Business 2.0 still existed, I wrote a column about lying, and as it occurred to me in the course of doing the work for that column, that a lie takes two people; the person who tells it and the other individual who wants to hear it. And so, in many ways we are our own worst enemy. We are complicit in many of the failures of the leadership industry. It is the consumers of the leadership industry’s products that want entertainment rather than enlightenment. It is the consumers of the leadership industry and the people who are selecting leaders who say we want leaders – I heard this story recently, even about the vaunted General Electric –who get good results, but only in the right way.   But then they are willing to make the tradeoff to get the good financial results, no matter the human toll that is exacted. So, it is we who are complicit.  In the Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld article that came out about Amazon recently, it’s just more controversy about this. One of the things I did in a Fortune column about that article is to look at the overlap between the most admired leaders and the most admired companies, and the best places to work. And not surprisingly, there is almost no overlap. Only four companies are on both those lists. So, we admire leaders who behave badly and exact huge tolls on their work force as long as they produce great financial results. That is something we are all individually and collectively responsible for.

SF:  There is something about those who seem to be the pinnacle of corporate society who have somehow belied this image of the grand and moral philosopher king that we all wish to have leading us to a better world, and that’s painful. So, as consumers what is available to us to start to deal more with that reality, that gap between what we wish for and what we’re actually paying for?

JF: First of all, we ought to do due diligence on leaders; we ought to do a little investigation. If I said to you tonight, I have discovered a cure for cancer and I’m going to sell it to you for $500 million, which by the way had I actually discovered the cure for cancer, that’d probably be the biggest bargain in history, before you write me a check for $500 million my suspicion would be you would do a fair amount of due diligence to figure out whether I knew what I was doing, and whether or not the cure that I have discovered actually had any positive therapeutic effects. When we make individual financial investment decisions or collective financial investment decisions, we do our due diligence. But when we listen to the leadership talks, the blogs, the TED talks, read the books, and hear the inspirational speeches, we want to believe. It’s almost like we want to believe in Santa Claus or something. So, we almost actively avert our eyes, as opposed to accepting the reality that every human being in the world is neither a complete saint nor a complete sinner. That there we’re all mixed individuals and have a combination of strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices. So, we ought to be more clinical and do our due diligence on leaders. There are sites like Glassdoor. Many things are available now since every courtroom in this country is automated and you can find case filings. You can find information.  You can talk to people. And you can find out whether the stories you are hearing are true or not. And while it is uncomfortable oftentimes to confront the truth, my favorite movie scene is Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise in Few Good Men – “You can’t handle the truth.” I do believe that not only can people handle the truth, but we need the truth. Because the only way we’re going to get from where we are with this low level of employee engagement is to understand realities of the situation, why we are where we are and measure our progress toward improving things.

SF: And that means really seeing a person for who she is or he is, as a flawed human being who is perhaps aspiring to doing the right thing, but has limited capacity, limited ability to see the world from different perspectives and is going to make mistakes.  When I have guests come to class, I ensure that they speak as much as possible, if not solely, about the various ways in which they have screwed up because I find that’s what students are really interested in hearing about. Because they see the gloss, but if you cut through that with the real story I find that helps people to see Oz. There’s a human being – I can still be successful and be flawed. So, does this resonate with what you’re suggesting, Jeff?

JF: Absolutely. The idea of having leaders talk about their flaws, the idea of having people look deeply into how leaders are actually doing, and when you see people behaving in interesting and funny and difficult and maybe even problematic ways, to not say, which I hear all the time, “Well, this person is wealthy and so it must be ok,” or “This person is successful.”  “This person is on the most admired list and built this great company.” You see this with the CEO of Uber. You see this with the CEO of Amazon. You see this with many CEO’s, where people will say “well, yeah…” I just read this wonderful blog, which refers to my book, but also talks about the new movie about Steve Jobs;  Brook Manville, who used to be a consultant for McKinsey, said the interesting thing about Jobs is that Jobs had all these flaws and was not the nicest human being to work for, but people would say, you know, he built the iPhone, he built the most valuable company on the planet and therefore, the fact that he behaved hideously, in some respects at least according to some people, we’re going to give him a little pass on that. But we don’t do that in the environmental field. I mean I don’t say, “Well Stew, your running Freedom Enterprises and you’re producing a great product, but you’re fowling the water and the air, but I’ll give you a pass because you’re successful.”  We don’t give people a pass on that anymore. We say you need to produce a great product at a good price, but you also need to do it in a way that maintains the integrity of the physical environment. And I believe we ought to have the same requirements for maintaining the social environment.

SF: I could not agree with you more. Jeff, I am afraid we have run out of time here. There is so much more I want to ask you about, but I am afraid we must conclude. Your work on taking down the leadership industry or really getting us to see it in a fresh light and what it really means for us to be growing leaders who can make a difference in our society is really so important, so refreshing, so provocative, and so useful.

About the Author

Ali Ahmed is an undergraduate senior majoring in Biological Basis of Behavior and minoring in Cinema Studies.

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

On Work and Life Stew Friedman spoke with Fred Kiel, a psychologist, author of Return on Character: The Real Reason Leaders and their Companies Win and coauthor of Moral Intelligence. For more than thirty years, he has helped Fortune 500 CEOs and senior executives.  And he’s known for his popular TED talk, Psychopaths in the C-Suite. They discussed how leadership character produces results at work and in other parts of life.

Stew Friedman: Let’s start with the definition of character; how do you define character?

Fred Kiel: We look at character in two different ways.   Everyone has their own self view of their character, and only you know what that is, what is in your heart, your intentions.  Most people view themselves as being highly principled and having strong character. However your character is revealed in how you treat other people and that is all that other people see; your behavior. So people judge your character based on your behavior, they view it as a reflection of what is in your heart.

SF: So these are two very different things, aren’t they? How you view yourself and how the world sees you.  And is character something that you see as immutable or is it possible to develop our own moral intelligence as you mature in life?

FK: I think it is very much possible to grow and develop; people do all the time. How you treat other people, a reflection of your character, is a matter of habit.  We have identified a long list of habits, or ways that people reveal their character, and based on how they treat other people.  Because they are habits, they can be changed. You can strengthen habits and you can replace bad habits with good habits; we all know that from other experiences in life. If you change your habits in the way you treat other people, it begins to change the inner you as well, and you become a stronger, more principled person.

SF: Can you give us an example, perhaps from your book, Return on Character, of one of the most prominent habits you see going awry and how to change that habit?

FK: One very good habit that leaders would be very wise to emulate is showing an interest in the development of other people, showing an interest in their personal goals as people.  Leaders are thought to be very goal-focused and a big mistake many leaders make is that they don’t stop to think about the fact that they have relationships with people.  They fail to show that interest in people and that has a major impact on the commitment and the level of engagement of the people around them.

SF: My late friend and mentor, Joel DeLuca, used to say, “relationships before strategy” as way to capture that.

FK: That’s a great way of saying it.

SF: If you have been trained and rewarded for getting results, without really caring about those around you as human beings beyond what they provide in terms of value in the work place, then how can you change that habit?

FK: The first step in habit change is to become acutely aware of the nuances of how you treat other people as objects.  The only way that you can get really objective data from others is through anonymous surveys. We have a 360 tool that we help people use to get that clarity. Maybe it is a series of different behaviors such as walking down the hallway and not giving people eye contact because you are on phone, or looking at your smart phone when you are in a meeting, or when you are talking to someone.   All of that telegraphs that I am not very interested in you as a person. So awareness is the first step.  The second step is deciding how important this is to you that you want to change. One of the things that we have done through our research is to show the impact these bad behaviors, bad habits, have on the bottom line. They really do diminish the bottom line in financial terms.

SF: Tell us how you found that.   What did you find in your observations about the connections between character and economic outcomes for businesses?

FK: We collected the return on assets for the two years prior to the time that we conducted our research with each CEO in our study. Then we compared return on asset figures for the ten strongest character CEO’s and teams in our study compared to those at the other end of the character spectrum, the low character CEO’s.  We found, amazingly, nearly 5 times the amount of return on assets for the strong character CEO’s vs. those CEOs low on character.

SF: How did you distinguish between these types of CEO’s in terms of their strong or weak characters?

FK:  Cultural anthropologists have identified certain practices and beliefs that people all over the world practice.  We chose four of these universal moral principles that all cultures teach their children; integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion. For those four moral principles we the identified a whole list of behavioral indicators of those four principles. We began with 65 and, through our research, we cut it down it a shorter list of 25.  Then we selected random samples of employees to rate how often the CEO’s and their senior teams display those behaviors.  So, for example, behaviors for integrity is how often they tell the truth and keep their promises.  For responsibility, for example, we ask how often do they own up to their own mistakes and accept the consequences of their decisions. For forgiveness, it was how often do they respond in a curious, forgiving way rather than a shaming and blaming way.  And finally on compassion, it’s how often do they show an interest in people and their personal goals and how often do they treat people as people versus treating them as objects. Once we had the independent ratings from random samples of employees we created an algorithm that put them together in to one overall score, which we call the ‘character score.’ Then we were able to rank these 84 CEO’s based on the strength of their ‘character score.’ And we got a nice spread; it was a matrix that could go from 0 to 100; the highest scoring CEO and team was at 92 and the lowest was at 54.  Then we looked at the two extremes.  We selected the bottom ten CEO’s and their teams and we compared those to the top.  There were really no significant differences in tenure, age or education.  But when we put in the character measures it just jumped out.  Nearly five times greater for the strong character CEO’s.  Also for the level of workforce engagement, it was 26% higher.  The high character CEO’s had a much lower risk profile in legal incidents and lower audit fees compared to their revenue base and fewer morality issues, fewer union problems for those workforces.

SF: So it pays to be good! Phyllis is calling from Pennsylvania.  Phyllis welcome to work and life.

Phyllis: As we are moving forward to a society that is more social media driven, one that has virtual office workers where everyone is communicating via email and managing tasks via email, how do you suggest employees or leaders start driving more towards knowing their employees better, understanding what their interests are and their goals are? I think we are getting a bit disconnected.  I have been in Information Technology for about 17 years and I have seen us moving to a virtual environment in communicating and we are not doing a good job of it. I think we are getting disconnected with people.

SF: That’s a great point that you raise Phyllis, about being less connected. Fred, what do you think about how the digital age has changed the nature of how character is revealed and expressed?

FK: This is the new normal.  Most organizations are global. They not only have distances to deal with, they have different time zones to deal with, so it is definitely a challenge.  But technology is also filling in with face-time services like Google Hangout and others.  I work in a virtual organization and only three or four times a year do I see all of our company together in one spot. We have a lot of opportunities to talk remotely through technology. It takes more effort but there is a real art and skill to showing who you are to another person even when you are on the telephone. With email you have to pay special attention to make it very conversational and to focus on not being so very curt and short, as most of emails are.  It really pays dividends to build relationships that way.

SF: So what do you do to make it work in your organization?  What have you seen in strong character leaders in terms of how they operate virtually? What kinds of things specifically, what sorts of habits do they bring to bear on their relationships?

FK: When anyone started off every meeting just by getting right to the tactics, it could be a problem.  There’s usually some conversations in the beginning, and, just like in face-to-face meetings, they are run by people who have relationships. They just don’t jump in to the business context, they talk about events surrounding them and what you might call small talk, but that is just increasing the lubrication for the relationship.  That can be done by telephones, Face-Time and Skype, for example, just as well as in person.

SF: But the tendency, that Phyllis is raising here, is for us to ignore the pleasantries and small talk, as you call it, that are the grease that make the wheels of relationships run. So how do we reverse that? If you are caught up in the hamster wheel of virtual relationships that get right in to business what can you do to break in to that?

FK: I think it is a matter of awareness and personal discipline to not let that happen. Relationships require maintenance and a lot of people overlook that.  That’s why we have such a disconnected workforce in many companies; because leaders treat employees like objects and don’t pay attention to the relationship. Mangers need to see and understand the connection; if you behave this way it has an impact on the bottom line.  The best place to start is to increase awareness because that provides the fuel for wanting to take care of this as an issue.

SF: The awareness provides the motivation.  I would like to pick up on what you speak about and in your book, Return on Character, as the real reason leaders and their companies win. You have got a blue print there for building your own leadership character and creating character driven organizations that drive better business results. How can people build their own leadership character to make it stronger than it is right now; where should one begin?

FK: You need to begin by popping the bubble we live in. All of us have our own cherished view of ourselves. Everyone views themselves as being of strong character. Through our research we discovered that of these 84 CEO’s there were about 30% of them that had a fairly accurate view. But the other 70 percent grossly overestimated themselves. They were at the bottom of the curve, based on the surveys of their employees, but rated themselves higher than how the so-called virtuoso CEOs rated themselves!

SF: So there is a humility factor with the high character, virtuoso, CEOs.

FK: But CEO’s at the bottom of the curve rated themselves 30 times higher than their employees rated them. So first step in change is to pop that bubble and it is difficult.

SF: Scary.

FK: Most people don’t want to tell you the truth; they learn ways to work around your annoying habits rather than telling what they are. So it is only with real persistence that you are able to get people to tell you the truth. You need to make it very safe for them by being very open and reacting with curiosity rather than by being defensive.

SF: Most people are fearful of speaking truth to power so, as a boss, how do you make it easy for somebody to tell you that you are causing problems for them?  And how can you stay open and keep those channels for feedback open so that you are continually learning how you come across, in terms of your character, to people around you?  How do you keep those channels open?

FK: If you are a boss, one way to demonstrate to others that is safe to give feedback is to openly talk about what you understand are some of your weaknesses and mistakes.  Openly ask, ‘I’m open to hear more about this and that’s why I would love to get feedback’. Now if you have a history of not being so open, then you often won’t have people who are willing to say anything. So it will be a challenge.  You may turn to using a 360 tool to provide people with the cover of anonymity in order to get feedback. If you do use the 360 tool, then you are not able to get a very accurate picture from your direct reports. We discovered that direct reports live in the same bubble along with their manager.  Or they are too fearful that they are going to be identified so they don’t tell the truth. We found that we got much different pictures when we went lower in the organization.  When you cast your net wide then you get real anonymity and the wisdom of the crowd, so you get the best judgment.

SF: So the best data for senior executives is at least a level or two removed from where they sit?

FK: Yes, two or three levels down.

SF: But then you have people observing from afar so they are making attributions about very limited data in terms of what they can observe, right?

FK: This is the beauty of the wisdom of the crowd.  When you combine the judgments of people who are independent of each other then you may only have a certain piece of the puzzle.  But with all aggregated and averaged you will come in with a very accurate picture as has been demonstrated over and over.

SF: So the place to start really is to have the courage to look at what people see when they see you. How does this affect your capacity to bring together work with other parts of your life? If  your character central to who you are, then by being a strong character leader, someone who demonstrates these habits of integrity, compassion, responsibility and forgiveness,  how does that help in terms of being able to create a sense of harmony between work and family and community?

FK: As you change your outward behavior, that is the outer journey.   But there is usually an inner journey that people take when they are focusing on strengthening their character habits. Most people go through an inner journey of trying to understand their whole life and create their own personal narrative. A coherent narrative helps to make sense of some of the painful and unhappy experiences earlier in their lives and they can see the impact these have had on the person they are today. This is just a process of becoming a more integrated person.  Often when you become more other-centered, that is what character is all about; it is becoming more other-centered.  The more you become other-centered the more that you find you are curious about others rather than judgmental.  And all of that is an inner journey that helps to become a more integrated person.   As people achieve that sense of integration they generally report a much more sense of balance and peacefulness in their lives.  They have had time for inner reflections so that they pay attention to other things that are important to them other than just career.

SF: I suspect that you have worked with people who have had transformative experiences that kind of shock them into realizing there’s a problem with their character. What is it that typically up ends a person’s view of themselves that opens them to creating some change?

FK: Well the common concept is that of a wakeup call and that can happen in any number of ways.  For example, having your spouse say, “Honey we need to talk.”   And then to discover that things are fraying at the edges with regard to your home life. That can be a wakeup call.  But just getting the data in 360 [feedback from those around you] about how the organization views you, what your reputation is in the organization, can be a real dramatic wake-up call. We have the experience of that being a jarring experience for people to have their bubble popped, to see how they are truly viewed by others.

SF: Especially the people at the lower end of the spectrum of character. You must get a lot of resistance from people who see a view of themselves that is shocking and discordant with their own view.

FK: Actually we don’t.  If you position this as something that is really smart for them to do, they understand that there is a connection between how they treat people and the bottom line.  And they are motivated to improve the bottom line. And then, of course, the art of being a helper in this kind of journey with somebody is not to be judgmental but to shepherd them through this process. Usually when you give that data to people they take it in what appears to be pretty reasonable fashion.  You find out in the next few days that they have gone through a more dramatic, more painful time. We always say this is not the kind of information that will harm you; it will cause you pain but it won’t be any kind of pain that harms you.  In fact it is the kind of pain that is necessary for growth.

SF: When asking students and clients to do a form of 360 that involves not just their work environment but the other parts of their lives as well, when they engage in dialogue to discover directly how other people see them and they are fearful of doing this because they are afraid of what they are going to find out, my offer to them is wouldn’t you rather know than not know? Leaders have to deal with reality, don’t they?

I am going to be at graduation this weekend here at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Wharton school’s MBA program graduation.  What would you say to the graduates here about what they can be doing and thinking about with respect to taking their characters to the next level of strength and development?

FK: I would ask all of them to reserve time in their lives for reflection and for getting feedback.  They should approach life with curiosity and openness.   That is the best formula for moving down the road of character development; is to be open and vulnerable and curious.

SF: You have been studying this for a long time; what changes have you seen at the top of organizations in the time that you have been in this field and exploring questions of character in the business world?

FK: I have seen some remarkable changes where people come to me privately and say, “How did you manage to pull off a personality transplant?” And it is not that we do that at all.  It is just that we bring the tools to people to really get in touch with who they want to be as people so that their outer behavior matches more closely with their intentions and with the good person that they believe they are and want to be.

SF: It is not magic, there’s a method.

What about the changes in society? What have you seen over the last couple of decades in terms of values, aspirations and character of leaders at the top of organizations?   What trends have you observed?

FK: Over the last 3 or 4 decades we have evolved into much more of a me-focused society especially as it relates to business leaders and other leaders.  But I see encouraging green shoots coming up to change that. Harvard business review just published an article yesterday on compassion and leadership that would never have been something that would have been in that kind of publication even two years ago. So I think society is changing. We also have a whole new group of young people coming up called the millennials that I am pretty high on.  I see them as people that are much more willing to take a look at these kinds of issues and place a higher priority on character development and relationships.

SF: I am seeing that too, not only with my students, but also in our 20-year longitudinal survey. I agree that there is hope for the future as more young people are thinking of what it means to have a positive social presence and impact in the world.

For more information about Fred Kiel visit his web site www.returnoncharacter.com and follow him on Twitter @FKiel.

Join Work and Life next Tuesday at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111.  Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

Contributor: Sathvik Ramanan

Work and Life is a radio program hosted by Stew Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, on Sirius XM’s Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Every Tuesday at 7 pm EST, Stew speaks with everyday people and the world’s leading experts about creating harmony among work, home, community, and the private self (mind, body, and spirit).

On Work and Life, Stew Friedman spoke with Shelly Ibach, president and CEO of Select Comfort Corporation, an innovative leader in sleep products and services and creator of the Sleep Number bed. She was recently recognized as one of the Girl Scouts’ Women of Distinction. Stew spoke with Ms. Ibach on creating a corporate culture that values the employee as a whole person and how to connect employees to a company’s mission and vision.

The following are edited excerpts of their conversation.

Stew Friedman: Tell us more about the connection between your sleep products and that end goal of individualizing the sleep experience and enriching it and how this affects what you do as a CEO to shape the company’s culture and its business strategy?

Shelly Ibach: As a mission-based culture, it was always important for us to establish a vision that was really big enough for the mission.  Our strategy and mission are consumer-based, and we are focused on innovation.  This means we need to have deep insight into our customers and be able to translate them into innovations that will solve sleep problems.

SF: So you have to be listening very carefully.

SI: Absolutely, and pay attention to trends. When you’re an innovator, it’s not only about the invention, but it’s also about the application. So the simplicity for the consumer is critical.

SF: Simplicity so that that they can understand what it is that you’re offering and how it’s going to help them?

SI: Exactly, and in the example of SleepIQ technology, all you have to do is get in bed and sleep. You don’t have to turn anything on; there’s nothing you need to wear, and it’s a full-body algorithm about you as an individual. And that information is there for when you want it. To be able to take an invention, like the sensor technology that comes with SleepIQ, and then move that into a consumer durable so that it truly is the inner net of things – that’s the kind of work that our team passionately pursues on behalf of our customers.

SF: What do you need to do to enable your employees to come to work every day, not only well rested, but also impassioned about this mission?

SI: We have to have an environment where everyone is clear on our goals, our strategic framework, and our vision. Our vision is to become one of the world’s most beloved brands by delivering unparalleled sleep experiences.  Everyone must understand how their role can specifically contribute to our strategic, long-term vision. People want to, and need to, be able to contribute and bring their whole self to work and be valued for their contributions.

SF: So How do you produce that line of sight between what I as an employeedo every day  and that inspiring end goal? What are the practices that help people see that connection?

SI: A big part of it is embracing diversity and striving to unleash each individual’s greatness. We have a number of recognition programs and one of our annual and most important recognition programs is called the Bradley Erickson Award. This is an award that is voted on by peers at headquarters. We seek to recognize a person or a team that has not only led innovation or collaboration across the organization, but also embraces the whole person, so it’s personal as well as work-related.

SF: So this is about recognition – it speaks to your values – and that’s certainly what you want to do with recognition programs. But on a day-to-day basis, how is it that you help people to see the connection between who they are as individuals and what you’re trying to do as a company?

SI: Our customer is at the core of everything we do. So at any meeting that we go to in our organization, you’re going to hear about “Sarah.” “Sarah” is our target customer. That helps connect the mission and the vision and the strategy. Everyone is thinking and making decisions on behalf of “Sarah,” and that’s a common thread throughout our organization.

SF: So “Sarah” is a fictional person who embodies the central brand proposition?

SI: Absolutely, yes. We get to know “Sarah,” not just from a demographic perspective, but from a psychographic one, and we strive to understand what she values and how our innovation can contribute to her life and improve not only her life, but her family’s life. That’s what motivates us.

SF: So as you talk to other CEOs, what do you share about your company’s practices that others find intriguing or try to adopt themselves? What should people who run companies or parts of companies be focused on as they try to figure out creative ways in their lives or in their businesses to connect the individual to the core interests of the end user – the customer, consumer or client?

SI: For us, it goes back to the customer. We do everything with our customer in mind. We’re a company that has a net promoter score, so we measure from our customer’s point of view whether they’re interested in repeating and referring. That’s the most important measurement we have. We believe that as we continue to evolve and focus on our customer’s experience, it translates to financial improvement as well.

Join Work and Life next Tuesday at 7 pm on Sirius XM Channel 111.  Visit Work and Life for a full schedule of future guests.

About the Author

Sathvik Ramanan is an undergraduate freshman in the Vagelos Program in the Life Sciences and Management at the University of Pennsylvania.