If I Lost You at Virtues

The skeptic’s case for virtue-driven leadership.

If I lost you at “virtues,” I get it.

 

Say that word in a leadership meeting and watch the room. Somebody checks their texts on their phone. Another person rolls their eyes. Someone else decides this is the part of the agenda they can scan their email.

 

I don’t blame them. The word carries its own baggage. To some it sounds like Sunday school. Others hear “virtues” and think “values,” words that appear on a poster above the break room coffee maker, hung years ago and long since faded into the wallpaper.

 

I take the objection seriously. At the same time, I’m not here to convince you. I simply offer an insight realized after a year-long sabbatical reflecting on communication and leadership.

 

To be clear, I’m talking about virtues, not values. Values and virtues are often used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Values are what we prioritize. Virtues are how we embody those priorities. Additionally, the case for virtue-driven leadership doesn’t depend on you accepting the word or using it at all.

 

I didn’t come to this through a pulpit

I spent decades in corporate communications. My job was to write what leaders said they believed, then watch what they decided or did next. Sometimes those things lined up, and you could feel the place hum. Many times they didn’t, and I had a front row seat to watch a few thousand people slowly and silently stop believing anything we sent them.

 

That say-do gap is where this work comes from, not a sermon. A seat with a very good view of the distance between a message and a behavior.

 

My faith as a Baha’i does inform how I see the world and the people in it, and I’ll be upfront about that, I own it. That said, Lead with Light™ doesn’t ask you to share my faith or even have one because the framework isn’t built on belief alone. It’s built on behavior.

 

Nobody builds a tradition around cowardice

Which raises the fair follow-up. Whose behavior, by whose standard?

 

Here’s what surprised me. Katherine Dahlsgaard, Christopher Peterson, and Martin Seligman combed the canonical texts of eight traditions. Confucianism and Taoism. Buddhism and Hinduism. Athenian philosophy, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Six virtues kept surfacing in all of them: courage, justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence.

 

Eight traditions that agree on almost nothing else agree on that.

 

Run the test backward, which is the part I find more persuasive. No society in recorded history has built a moral tradition around cowardice. Nobody raises children to admire cruelty, or holds up the dishonest neighbor as the one to copy. You’ll find people behaving that way in every culture on earth. What you won’t find is a culture that admires it on purpose.

 

Eight world traditions aren’t the same as surveying every culture on earth, and I won’t pretend it is. Still, the overlap is hard to wave off.

 

That’s what makes virtues unifying and portable. They transcend culture, ethnicity, gender, faith, and politics, because virtues  were never the property of any of them. Whether you have a faith tradition, are agnostic or atheist, courage in Atlanta looks like courage in Osaka. The Sunday school objection assumes these universally admired qualities belong to somebody’s religion. They don’t.

 

Values hang on the wall. Virtue-driven actions walk down the hall.

Here’s the distinction that dissolves most of the faith-based and woo-woo objection.

 

A value is something you hold. A virtue-driven action is something you do, either in front of people or when no one is looking, on an ordinary Tuesday, when it costs you something.

 

Courage isn’t a feeling. It’s delivering the difficult message face to face instead of sending the email or avoiding it altogether.

 

Humility shows up when you name the person who had the better idea, out loud, in the meeting where credit gets assigned.

 

Accountability looks like owning the miss before somebody else raises it.

 

None of that requires a particular belief system. All of it is observable. And observable turns out to be measurable, which is where the reputation virtues are soft starts falling apart.

 

The least sentimental case for virtue-driven leadership

Tony Simons, a Cornell researcher, studies what he calls behavioral integrity. He’s blunt that it isn’t “about some higher moral code.” It’s whether a leader’s words and actions match.

 

Simons and Judi McLean Parks surveyed roughly 6,500 employees across 76 Holiday Inn hotels, asking one question several ways: does your manager do what they say? Then they matched those answers against guest satisfaction, turnover, and profitability.

 

An improvement of one-eighth of a point on a five-point scale tracked with as much as 2.5 percent of revenue. For an average full-service property, Simons put that above $250,000 a year.

 

A word of caution here because I want to be accurate and clear. That’s an association inside one industry at one moment, not proof that integrity causes profit. Read it yourself and reach your own conclusion.

 

Gallup supplies the piece that assigns responsibility. Its research puts at least 70 percent of the difference in team engagement down to the manager. Not the perks. Not the pay band. The person.

 

What it looks like with the books open

Research shows you the pattern. Companies show you the work. Leaders reveal their character.

 

When the 2008 recession cut orders at Barry-Wehmiller by roughly a third, Bob Chapman, the chief executive at the time who has recently passed, refused the industry reflex to layoff employees. Instead, everyone took four weeks of unpaid furlough, himself included. Better that we all suffer a little than any of us suffer a lot, he reasoned. Then employees started trading furlough days so colleagues who needed the pay most could keep working.

 

Name the virtues afterward and they’re obvious. Fairness. Courage. Humility. Truthfulness, because Chapman leveled with people about how bad things were. Nobody in that company called any of it virtue-driven action at the time. They didn’t need the vocabulary to demonstrate the behavior.

 

I gathered that case and several others, including WD-40, Patagonia, Southwest, Microsoft, and Honest Health, into a white paper you can read for free. Full disclosure: none of those companies have worked with me or used this framework. They’re evidence of a pattern, not endorsements.

 

Where I’ll concede ground

To my knowledge, nobody has run the experiment you’d want to make the case definitively. You can’t take a thousand companies, randomly assign virtue-driven leadership to half of them, and check back in twenty years. So anyone promising certainty here is selling something. That’s not my style.

 

The closest parallel I know is physical training. Show up, do the reps, keep showing up, and your body changes. No honest trainer will give you a date. But you will see and feel results.

 

That’s my claim. Direction is dependable and positive result will come. The timetable is yours, and you don’t fully control it either.

 

Use your weekend words

Still allergic to the vocabulary? Then drop it.

 

Call it keeping your word or follow-through. File it under not being the reason good people dread Sunday night or decide to update their résumés. You can run this entire practice using the words you’d use on a Saturday or in your morning huddle with your team, and the behavior won’t know the difference.

 

How we do what we do — how we lead — is as important as what we achieve.

 

Parting Thoughts

Skepticism is welcome here. I’d rather have a skeptic who tests this against the income statement than a convert who nods politely along and changes nothing.

 

You’ve had leaders that you’ve admired. What’s the golden thread that weaves them together? My guess is that they were transparent and truthful, even when it was uncomfortable. They were humble, recognizing they weren’t the smartest person in the room. They were generous with their time, encouragement, praise, and support. They helped you connect your work to something bigger and made your feel safe, seen, heard, and valued.

 

To become the leader that you were born to be, start small. Name one thing you said you’d do this week, then at the end of the week ask honestly whether you did it. That’s the say-do gap on a personal level, and closing it is where trust begins.

 

If you want the evidence before the practice, the business case is yours for the reading.

 

Be clear. Be kind. Lead with Light! ✨