Character Formation - A Strategic Imperative
Among the many strategies that organizations embark on, leadership character formation is a strategic imperative – regardless of the environmental conditions, but especially when the surrounding environment threatens the organization's mere existence. Unfortunately, for some, character-building work is not as popular or exciting. It's time-consuming and it requires patience to invite a deeper exploration of the human person behind the role. This requires an investment over time. A key question in this regard is, “why would this investment be any different than any other business investment to strengthen the organization for the long run?”
Unless organizational leaders are committed to and consistently integrate basic character fundamentals into their leadership styles, (bringing to life integrity, a basic value system, and particularly honesty) everything that leader does will be loosely hinged. When what leaders do is loosely hinged, they risk erosion of trust. When we are no longer entrusted to sustain and advance the organization's mission for the short and long term, especially in tough economic times, we have compromised holistic leadership effectiveness. Character flaws will then describe our existence.
Mitigating this risk calls for strategies to fully invest in growing the human person as we would fully invest the human person in growing the business. In my mind, these are interdependent strategies.
The Complexity of Faith - Based Leadership – Lead Us Not Into Temptation…
St. Vincent's hospital systems is called to lead in a faith-based ministry, which has an added dimension of complexity during times of economic uncertainty. There is not only the expectation that we preserve and sustain our ministry and mission through holistic leadership practices, but we are also expected to advance the mission by stewarding the functional and operational aspects of ministry work, i.e., strengthening our service competence, advancing our strategic direction, designing an operating model with the goal of operational excellence, strengthening our workforce capability to contribute to ministry success, and measuring our performance outcomes with the intent to sustain the mission.
When the pressure is high to perform, we are alerted to an elevated temptation to focus only on the operational dimensions of our ministry. Within this impulse, we run the risk of adopting a style-oriented, short term business leadership approach that gets us out of the boiling water versus an integrated ministry and business leadership approach that enables us to adapt the boiling water to the solutions that serve the greater good effectively. We are tested in our resolve to lead as ministry when challenged with environmental misfortune.
Our Call To Virtuous Leadership
I've come to the conclusion that leadership character is forged through the cultivation of virtue. Leadership and virtue are not only compatible, they are actually synonymous. One's growth as a leader runs parallel to one's growth in virtue. Virtues speak to who we are as human beings – who we are when we enter the world and what we should strive towards and attain to by being prudent, just, brave and temperate.
Virtues also enable us to attain the furthest potentialities of our human nature through humility, charity, faith and hope. While these may sound and feel soft in today's leadership paradigms, they are the essentials of our humanity that we bring to the workplace. We bring our whole selves to the workplace – we cannot mask our humanity at work. We should not diminish our humanity at work. We don't do enough at work to celebrate and affirm its potential.
The organization that strategically invests in strengthening its leadership character, evolving the virtuous leader, is an organization that recognizes, appreciates and values the power of holistic leadership, where its leaders are called to:
Leading with virtue creates a level playing field in our decision-making process when we are challenged with organizational issues and opportunities that have holistic implications. When woven into the fabric of leadership practice, it becomes the barometer by which we test our fortitude to “do the right thing” first, then do things right, which leads us to getting things done. When getting things done has the lead role, it becomes an organizational “mask” that imitates the right thing to do.
The Virtuous Leader Evolved
At St. Vincent Health, we have a fundamental belief that formation of executive leadership character will enable our leaders to lead congruently with the principles of our healing ministry. We collectively ascribe to the notion that strategic leadership character formation can be influenced and strengthened through holistic leadership practices that include:
We believe that when these values and practices are woven into the fabric of our leadership culture, we will evolve a leader prepared to be entrusted with all of the responsibilities for holistic leadership. Additionally, we believe that when our personal values are both intrinsically and extrinsically aligned with organizational values, moral excellence and character will be pervasive throughout our organization.
Our strategy, to that end, is to invest in the human person of leadership through focused education and competence - building learning and experiential events. In this regard we introduce guided opportunities to practice what is learned to strengthen our competence and proficiency for leadership.
Our leadership approach is multi-dimensional. We approached this strategy much like the “organizational physician”, through assessment, diagnosis, treatment and measurement techniques. This approach forced us to create a supporting workplace infrastructure where we bridged the tenets of spirituality and ministry, and leadership character formation, with functional operating tools, systems and events to bring these principles to life.
These infrastructure interventions also serve as daily reminders of who we are as ministry, as our leadership team integrates them in the daily process of leadership. I fundamentally believe that unless you integrate the principles you want leaders to embrace into the day to day operations, constantly reminding them through practical tools and interventions of what they should aspire to, you diminish the opportunity for them to become practiced, effective and congruent within your desired leadership culture.
Our process includes the following four phases:
In all practicality, our strategy to evolve a culture of virtuous leadership at St. Vincent Health will not produce a prescription for efficient duplication and implementation - I suspect that those interested in the quick-fix formula will be disappointed to hear this.
This strategy is focused first on doing the right thing, then doing things right, which evolves to getting things done and measuring the meaning of the results. It requires patience in the evolution of the human person, not simply focusing on whether you have completed the task of herding people through a set of process steps with the hopes of them emerging as “more virtuous.” This strategy calls us to be practiced at balancing formation and function as we sustain the vitality of our mission and it recognizes that character formation is essential to achieving that end.
We are compelled to build a meaningful connection between character formation and our functional expertise. We strive to create a more holistic ministry leadership approach, where our executives lead with virtue as they work to sustain and advance the vitality of our ministry and mission. We fundamentally believe that character formation work and virtues integrity is enabled through intentional and committed self-exploration to strengthen one's personal authenticity. Authenticity is the foundation for human integrity. It is within our authenticity that we find the truth about our humanity. When we are true to who we are, we liberate our human spirit, giving ourselves permission to be whole. Leading holistically and virtuously, calls us to strengthen our authentic selves - being fully human and fully alive as we set the example of ministry leadership for others.
Leading with virtue at St. Vincent Health is not a pathway to an end. It's the pathway that gives us permission to do this work. It calls us to transformation and challenges us to be whole people at work. It differentiates us from the leadership status quo.
About the Author
Joseph O. Murdock is the System Vice President and Chief Organizational Development Officer of St. Vincent Health.
Read Part I of this two part series from Joseph O. Murdock.