Character lies at the heart of leadership

Well its been sometime since my last posting and that's for a variety of reasons, sometimes other things in life take over and finding a voice for my thoughts took a back seat. That said this week saw lots of news stories that I wanted to comment on.

 Earlier in the week we had politician Chris Huhne admitting his guilt to the charge of perverting the course of justice, he had for the past 10 years denied he was driving and had committed a speeding offence. As ever the cover up and consequences are going to be much worse than the original offence. A sad story of a talented politician and person with so much going for him falling from grace.

We had the news of the England Footballer Paul Gascoigne sadly lapsing back into hospital for rehabilitation to fight alcoholism. One of England's most talented footballers of his generation, now with his life gripped by a bottle and struggling to get his life back on track.

 The Royal Bank of Scotland have been hit with a 390 million pound fine for fixing the interbank lending rate (LIBOR) with traders e-mails exposing how they put their own personal wealth agenda before that of their bank, clients, or anyone else.

 Yesterday, we listened to Robert Francis QC, report on the findings and recommendations from the pubic enquiry he led into the issues, that resulted in the suffering and deaths of many patients at Stafford Hospital. He has made almost 300 hundred recommendations for change in a hospital trust that had completely lost sight of its purpose, to care for those at their most vulnerable. It was a gross dereliction of duty.

 Four seemingly unrelated stories, the sorts of bad news stories that unfortunately we hear far too often. All of these stories though different in content I would suggest are linked by the fundamental issue of leadership. It has a kind of old fashioned ring to it but its 'Character' that lies at the heart of leadership. Our desire and ability to avoid the path of least resistance, or fall for instant gratification is one of our greatest challenges.
 Call it 'strength of character' another old fashioned term, that strength or will is critical in situations that require leadership decisions.

The challenge for all of us is that almost everything we do ends up with us having to make a leadership decision. Everyday we are challenged with decisions of character. Recently my wife Julie and I took a receipt back to a till at Tesco, because after scanning through the bill we noticed they had under charged us.. 'you mean we have undercharged you!' The lady on the till looked shocked that we were actually bringing this to her notice. She said she has never had anyone bring her a receipt back for undercharging before. Please don't think that I am claiming to have achieved the some mystical goal of enlightenment. I am as challenged as the next person with holding true to my own personal values and standards. In this case I just thought it was the right thing to do.

 My wise friend and leadership guru Trevor Waldock puts it simply 'the choices we make inside, lead to actions, that lead to habits that form our character'. We can see this in the stories above, it starts off with seemingly insignificant decision, 'its ok to leave that person, I won't check on that patient, the next member of staff will be here to do it in 10 minutes' or 'no one will notice a small rise in that rate, I am sure everyone else is doing it anyway' or maybe ' it might look bad if I am seen to have been caught speeding, its not hurting anyone anyway'
 At the time we can all rationalise these decisions, and we can convince ourselves that they make perfect sense. The problem is that these situations hardly ever happen in isolation. A series of things happen, that threaten to expose these actions, and the pressure comes on... and then another decision has to be made, and another and another and before long we are hearing these stories and find it hard to relate to 'why' these people make such crazy decisions? Who in their right minds would leave a patient lying in their own excrement?...Think is was sensible to deny charges for 10 years when they know they are guilty...Think that no one would find out that the interest rate was being fixed?

 Character is a work in progress for me, I guess that's the same for many of us, something we are all trying hard to remind ourselves of and keep in context.