THE VALUE OF VIRTUE
People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And that was essential that the discourse of science or logic related directed to the external world. The other was mythos, what the Greeks called myth, which didn’t mean a fantasy story, but it was a narrative associated with ritual and ethical practice, but it helped us to address problems for which there were no easy answers, like mortality, cruelty, the sorrow that overtakes us all that’s part of the human condition. And these two were not in opposition; we needed both.1
—KAREN ARMSTRONG
In ancient Greece, stories and facts were recognized as two distinct ways of thinking. Logos sought truth, and mythos sought meaning. Mythos relied on narratives or stories. Logos focused on logic and facts. Mythos and logos were viewed as complementary ways to think; both were considered important.
Today, the dominant organizational language is more logos than mythos. We rely on numbers, computation, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and metrics. Recall the adage, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Fair enough, but the converse view is that “Not everything that matters can be measured.” The language of logic contributes to efficiency, speed, convenience, and progress. Logos, or reason, enables people to function effectively in the world. Logos is essential to our survival. Yet, the mythos questions that often go unanswered are these: “Why are we doing this? What is all this for?” Mythos typically comes as story.
Stories have the potential to elevate us to excel by deepening meaning and unlocking potential; after all, stories inspire, and facts convince. Author and professor Joseph Campbell said that stories serve as a moral compass for each generation. Stories and lore provide guideposts of how we can live our life and educate us about how to become responsible adults. Without this insight, Campbell stated that we mistake celebrities who pursue fame and fortune for heroes. The celebrity strives to be known rather than to give or achieve for others.
A celebrity culture tends to worship youth over the elderly, which leads us to strive for appearance over wisdom. Campbell concluded that a celebrity culture produces children who act like adults and adults who act like children.2 As we age, mythos and virtue guide us to become more responsible. Stories can teach and inspire. We learn to release ourselves from fear, desire, and malice by pursuing virtue instead. Without the guideposts of mythos and virtue, we are weakened by anxiety, stress, and adversity. We can’t eliminate pressures and adversity, but the practice of virtue makes us more resilient.
Logos minus mythos contributes to what E. O. Wilson called humanity’s real problem: “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” Our technologies are stunningly brilliant at advancing globalized trade, exploring Mars with helicopters, engineering driverless cars, and replacing chemotherapy with targeted genetic treatments to cure cancer. Technology also weaponizes worldwide terrorism, provides a megaphone for hate, and makes for an anxious future for those who lack digital skills.
An example of this divide between the wonders of technology and the incompleteness of technology alone—the logos-mythos divide—is evident in our response to the pandemic. Amazingly, scientists around the globe collaborated to develop a vaccine with unprecedented efficacy and speed. Yet sadly, our institutions and cultures struggled to put needles into enough arms to achieve herd immunity or to assure that access to the vaccine was equitable around the globe.
Albert Einstein put the limitation of science this way:
Science has provided the possibility of liberation for human beings from hard labor, but science itself is not a liberator. It creates means not goals. Man should use [science] for reasonable goals. When the ideals of humanity are war and conquest, those tools become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three. We must not condemn man’s inventiveness and patient conquest of the forces of nature because they are being used wrongly and disobediently now. The fate of humanity is entirely dependent upon its moral development.3
VALUES AND VIRTUE
Here is a simple way to understand the relationship between values and virtues. Values express our beliefs. Virtues put our values into action. Remember that it isn’t a virtue until we act. Let’s say an organization valued integrity. How this value would be defined and how it would be put into action would be unclear.
The seven virtues define what integrity means and provide insights and tools to put integrity into practice. For example, if we want more trust, then we need to practice trustworthy acts. The virtues come with a robust playbook to help teams put values such as trust into action. The result will be better humans and better performance.
Now let’s descend into the particulars. While values and virtues have similarities, the differences between values and virtues are not widely understood. Values in particular are confusing because the word carries multiple meanings such as economic value, or valuable experiences such as customer or teammate experience, or what people believe is important.
Values often lean against a logos wall that uses metrics for the studs. For example, a key profit metric is total shareholder return. As another example, customer value metrics might include “likelihood to recommend.” In the nonprofit sector such as healthcare, patient safety relies on medical error metrics, or the patient experience includes timeliness-of-care metrics such as “wait time to see a healthcare professional.” These are perfectly appropriate and important logos metrics.
There are also values that lean more against the mythos wall best constructed by stories. Still, logos-oriented leaders bring their measurement stick prowling for value metrics more than stories. Indeed, engagement metrics are indirect measures for how well the culture lives up to its values. However, people are not motivated by engagement scores. When data and dollars metrics matter more than community and character stories, then people feel like replaceable cogs in a machine. When that happens, there’s no human reason to stay in a job or to give our all. The goal is morale—how people actually feel in the workplace—not chasing engagement scores. Remember the root word for morale is moral, which takes us back to virtue.
The impact of culture also influences value and virtue differently. Values are extensively shaped by the culture that it reflects and belongs to. For example, business wants to win, something you are not likely to hear in healthcare. Healthcare wants to treat patients and make them better. These are not words you are likely to hear in business. Even within the same industry, one culture might emphasize innovation, and another might emphasize operational excellence. So, values are principles that are considered important to a specific organization.
Whereas values are specific to a particular culture, virtues are universal and transcend organizations and cultures. An act of compassion is the same in New York as it is in Islamabad. Furthermore, acting with compassion to help the sick was the same in the 1918 to 1919 Spanish flu pandemic as it has been during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike values, virtues offer a multicultural framework, which is especially important to global organizations that are committed to diversity and inclusion.
Values can help an organization stand out from the crowd. Virtues do not differ from culture to culture. What does stand out and differentiate organizations and cultures is not the values they espouse but rather how well virtue is practiced. Values may or may not have a moral dimension. Virtues always have a moral dimension. Values don’t speak to how someone can best live. Virtues define what it means to live life well.
The punch line is that if an organization or a leader has the opportunity to start from scratch to define their principles, it is best to go with building a virtue-based culture. If the culture is preformed, then they should work on anchoring virtues into existing values. For example, as an academic medical center, if our mission is “educating those who serve” and we value training the next generation of healthcare professionals superbly, then we should instill virtue—compassion, trust, wisdom, justice, and so on—into the educational process and the learning environment.
To be clear, we mustn’t think of values or virtues as a dichotomous choice. They are not mutually exclusive. We should think of values and virtues.
Values express our beliefs. Virtues put our beliefs into action.
VIRTUE AND ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE
At their best, organizations are not personal platforms for individual careers. Instead, the best organizations shape the character of their people, enabling the institutions to fulfill their societal purpose. This means that lawmakers put the rule of law ahead of getting elected; journalists put accurate reporting ahead of social media hits; doctors fully embrace a “patients-first” philosophy before medical procedures; and business leaders put people and the planet ahead of profits.4
When organizations adopt the virtues as a common language of excellence, there are tangible benefits. Having a common language about what the virtues are and what they mean changes the culture by changing the conversations among people and how they practice excellence. When virtue is present, relationships and performance are strengthened. Stories about when we got the virtues right ring true, which doesn’t deny that we fall short of our aspirations.
Virtues can and should force hard decisions when, not if, we fall short of our ideals. The virtues unify us because most of us want to do something that is not purely selfish and we want to be part of something larger than ourselves. In contrast to having a set of self-proclaimed values, there are thousands of years of human experience that define what virtue means and decades of empirically validated activities surrounding the ways in which virtue is practiced well.
The ancient Greeks understood that humans had a natural desire to pursue moral excellence. This pursuit to “aim at the good” included practicing virtue even in a world that could sometimes be harsh and cruel. This is exactly why a group of high school students decided to use the virtues to better understand organizations and themselves. After studying virtue, they reached several conclusions about what happened when the virtues were absent, including these:
Egomaniac leaders who lacked virtue created dysfunctional cultures.
Self-centered leaders created close-minded, toxic cultures where people distrusted each other and their customers.
When team members lacked faith in each other, there was no shared purpose. People hid mistakes and lied to superiors. When this happened, people worked for a paycheck, not the company. They were less likely to perform at their best or stay in the organization.
In contrast, when the virtues were present, the students noted real benefits: teams were more productive, creative, and collaborative, and they worked harder. When that happened, virtue became a reality that people could see and feel.
This all got started when a high school junior heard what his father learned at work about the virtues in a seminar on the subject of embracing and teaching the virtues as the foundation for performance. His son became intrigued and read our earlier book about virtue-based performance, Exception to the Rule.5 He then asked his father to introduce him to an author of the book, one of us, to learn how to launch a club where students could study and practice virtue.
Imagine this. As the ancient Greeks suggested, high school students wanted to learn how to practice virtue because it was intrinsically meaningful to them. Rather than limit their education to extrinsic goals such as grades, advanced placement classes, and college applications, they wanted to become better humans. Students wanted an education about virtue because these ideas were missing in their curriculum. Their school’s mission was to “inspire and empower learners,” but the school—in its compliance mindset—nevertheless required the new club to find a teacher because the school’s rule was that every club had to have a teacher overseeing it. In addition, the school’s mission was silent on the value of character.
Finding a teacher who would empower students to learn and practice virtue turned out to be a challenge. Students called their initiative an “innovative leadership club” so that the request wouldn’t be rejected because of the word “virtue.” It seems curious to imagine that the word virtue would be a liability rather than an asset, but this serves as a reminder that the virtues—though time-honored—are still foreign and perhaps even threatening in many organizations, including many high schools.
In the end, these students reported that they learned how internal changes to their character yielded external results. They found a teacher who was willing to endorse the group but who stepped aside so they could self-manage their club. These empowered students adjusted to COVID-19 by delivering content online. They designed activities like this one:
Think about the people who are closest to you in life.
Use the “trust-to-distrust” spectrum, and consider this question: “Where would your closest family and friends place you?”
Reflect on your strengths and where you want to get better.
The purpose of this story is not to disparage high schools. Rather, the purpose is to demonstrate that students want to learn and practice virtue in ways traditional curricula don’t support. Sadly, schools must comply with legislative mandates to test students on what they know using curricula that are silent on the issue of building character.
While universities don’t face the same kind of testing mandates as K–12 schools, they also tend to teach logos more than mythos. We can learn from Plato’s Academy’s concern for leaders who lacked the moral strength required to act according to the common good. Since Plato’s concern applies equally well today, organizations would be wise to teach virtue to fill the void left by schools and universities.
A holistic investment in virtue, beyond making it a simple mandate or a platitude, protects the organization’s reputation by helping people do the right thing, for the right reasons, in the right way. At the individual level, investing in embracing and teaching virtue helps people replace fear and angst with courage and purpose. Better humans, better performance.
This story about high school students reflects a much broader human hunger to apply ancient wisdom to contemporary problems.
The virtues are available to all of us, but they are often hidden in plain sight, as they seemed to be in the high school.
The ancients also clearly suggested that virtue is best pulled, not pushed. In other words, the virtues are attractors because they have intrinsic and universal appeal, not because they have been disseminated or mandated as organizational propaganda. About 2,500 years ago, Confucius counseled leaders to practice virtue because people willingly follow a ruler of good character governed by acts of compassion and generosity (a pull), making coercion (a push) unnecessary. Mencius, a follower of Confucian philosophy, believed that even though humans tend toward benevolence and wisdom, virtue needs to be cultivated.6 In the case of the high school students, they didn’t study and practice virtue because they had to. They did so because they wanted to.
PRIORITY MATTERS: VIRTUES FIRST AND PERFORMANCE FOLLOWS
In our professional lives, we need to do well in our jobs. After all, we need to make a living. While individual success is a good thing, supporting teammates and customers is a better thing. While a comfortable life is a pleasant thing, using our skills to lift up others even when it makes us uncomfortable is a better thing. Fortunately, success and significance are not mutually exclusive. We can do good and be good. Our individual priorities are not necessarily wrong or wacky. The challenge is getting the order right.
In our personal lives, self-care can include activities such as yoga, mindfulness, and a kale diet. Good health is something to be respected, though pursuing good health to an extreme can become a narcissistic project. It is important to take care of ourselves; yet we become disordered when self-care slips into self-absorption. A “selfie” culture flies in the face of research that makes it clear that what truly fortifies us are meaningful connections and other-oriented actions.
In business, the folly of blindly and exclusively focusing on logos and numbers applies even to economic value. If you add the value of tangible assets such as buildings, land, and merchandise, that would be less than 10 percent of the Standard and Poor’s (S&P) Index’s $28 trillion market value. Stated differently, intangible assets, such as customer relationships, and intellectual property, as well as human talent and culture, account for 90 percent of the index’s total assets.7 Stated personally, 90 percent of your 401(k) plan has no hard assets to back up your retirement savings! Risk associated with your 401(k) is mitigated if the stocks you own are managed by character-based leaders. Hard-to-measure factors such as leadership, teamwork, and culture have a huge influence on whether wealth is created or destroyed.
Even when we manage to pursue something meaningful, we will do so with a group of imperfect people who get cranky with one another and the people they serve. That doesn’t mean that virtue is absent. It just means that practicing virtue is a high bar, an aspiration.
Consider the example of healthcare providers—physicians, nurses, and heath science professionals like respiratory therapists and physical therapists. All are evidence-based people using science in service of patients’ well-being. So, imagine the disappointment and the pain of an ICU nurse or doctor who loses an unvaccinated patient to COVID-19. Understandably, preventable deaths and health risks to others make caregivers discouraged and perhaps even angry. Despite these emotions, caregivers serve in accordance with the virtues—compassion is at the center of their work, whether caring for those vaccinated or not.
Rising above negative emotions to serve competently and compassionately is at the center of practicing medicine excellently.
The better the doctor, nurse, or healthcare professional, the better the patient outcomes.
DEFAULT TO OUR TRAINING
Under pressure, we default to our training. This insight is understood by soldiers, athletes, and astronauts. In the military, volunteers sign up to be put in harm’s way. In boot camp, a drill sergeant makes it clear that the military plans to take you up on your offer. Similarly, at NASA, astronauts volunteer to explore space in a life-threatening, zero-oxygen atmosphere. In both cases, people are trained to remain resilient in the face of adversity. Although professional sports are not about life-or-death experiences, the pressure to win is intense. So, athletes are trained to perform despite the pressure of screaming fans in stadiums and critical sports commentators who are ready to pounce on their mistakes.
There is much to learn from elite performers though even in their case, there is a glaringly missed opportunity. The better performer part is taken with great seriousness and rigor. The better human part is often not as well developed. Too often, organizations committed to elite performance revert to ethics defined as compliance to protect the organization’s reputation. I reward you for what you do well, and I punish you for when you mess up—the carrots-and-sticks approach.
Expanding the definition of ethics to mean “practicing virtue” is an important and inexpensive investment in optimizing the organization’s performance and protecting its reputation. Yet, when it comes to elite performance, the real head scratcher is this: character defined as virtue is a performance amplifier. Virtue means “excellence,” it is malleable, and when practiced well, it strengthens performance. Plenty of organizations are unaware of this research, so it should come as no surprise that this would be true even for organizations committed to elite performance. That said, when organizations are silent about putting ancient wisdom into practice, they are leaving performance potential on the table.8
While elite performers are not necessarily better humans, they do differ from the rest of us in at least two ways. First, they volunteered to work in adverse conditions. Second, they have been trained to handle uncertainty. The rest of us didn’t sign up for adversity or uncertainty. In fact, most of us would be quite pleased with stability. Our normal response to a crisis is that if we can just get to the other side of this mess, then we will be OK. We aim for stable and fulfilling careers, good health, happy families, and a comfortable life. All natural enough and quite understandable. But, when these goals come under threat, which they inevitably do, we often find ourselves fearful, anxious, and pessimistic.
And then there is the reality of life. Adversity finds us. Consider the pandemic. Who among us wanted it? But who among us could ignore it without the risk of peril to ourselves, loved ones, or society? Healthcare workers caring for COVID-19 infected patients were in a battle, just as if they were in the military—long, dangerous deployments. This was also true for frontline workers—truck drivers, people who worked in meatpacking plants, production workers, and other essential workers, all of whom put their personal health at risk to keep others safe. Most frontline workers didn’t sign up for that kind of risk, and they didn’t receive the kind of training offered to soldiers, astronauts, or athletes.
Most of us may lack physical and psychological tools to regulate our energy to manage fatigue. We may lack tools such as after action reviews to learn how to adapt rapidly to new circumstances. We may not have been aware of just how looking out for teammates strengthens performance and resilience. Lack of this training about character and about how to practice virtue in trying circumstances may well explain the high degrees of burnout we are presently seeing, as people are leaving these occupations that have been made stressful by external circumstances.9 This is why we wrote this book.
As the pandemic has taught us, a world of certainty and safety, free from danger, risk, and harm, just isn’t an option. Just as elite performers learn how to perform under pressure, so too do the rest of us need to be taught to move away from fear and toward hope.
Individually, we can learn to respond effectively to stress, pressure, and adversity.
Collectively, we can cocreate resilient cultures that are agile and adaptive. And once we learn to perform well under uncertain conditions, we are never the same. We become better humans and better performers.10
But how do we learn to excel in uncertain conditions? Areté in Greek refers to excellence of any kind, including moral virtue. An excellent person becomes highly effective by using courage, compassion, wisdom, and other virtues to achieve results when, not if, things go awry. By relying on areté as a principle for living, we can become what we practice. Aristotle said this. Neuroplasticity has proven this.
And how do we become an excellent team under uncertain conditions? Teammates best adapt to changing circumstances when they feel like they belong, matter, and make a difference. When people feel valued, they step up to add value.
The best predictor of team performance is how people treat each other, even more than who is on the team.11 Psychological safety comes first. Motivation and accountability for results come second—and the order matters. Teams perform well when vulnerability, asking questions, and learning are practiced intentionally. Teams perform poorly when humiliation, blame, and ignoring each other distract people from performance.12 The best teams don’t surrender to disagreements and bickering; they presume goodwill. If goodwill can’t be presumed, then they rethink their cause and their approach or whether they are on the right team.
How do cultures become resilient? Cultures are like gardens; they will grow whether or not leaders tend to them. Language, stories, and practice create resilient cultures. Leaders can tend a culture and enhance it by adopting the language of virtue and integrating its practice into daily operations. In addition, cultures are well tended through stories. Effective stories accept the facts of their situation. These narratives are realistically optimistic, inclusive, and resilient.
Here’s a narrative (paraphrased) from the CEO of a healthcare organization that successfully combatted the scourge of COVID-19: “Yes, there is a pandemic. It poses an existential threat to all of us and to our world. But we can navigate it. We can rely on each other. We can exercise compassion, trust, and justice in the face of adversity. We will make mistakes because we are fallible and because the situation is changing very quickly, but we will adjust, be nimble, and we will communicate with each other. Acting in these ways, we will prevail.” These are winning words that will harness the energy and high performance in the organization. Leaders play a key role in shaping stories to tend the garden of culture.
In contrast, ineffective stories deny the brutal facts or are full of toxic positivity: “The pandemic will just go away—don’t worry.” Such alternative narratives are exclusive, negative, and fragile. Leaders need to acknowledge people’s worries about the future. At the same time, they need to be clear that there is no option to go backward.