A. Strengthening Your Moral Skills
Think of moral skill building as a learning process like any other. Richard Boyatzis, noted leadership development expert, offers a particularly useful way of understanding how we build leadership capabilities.1 Boyatzis argues that we don’t learn to be better people or better leaders by attending training programs. We build our human and leadership capabilities through actual life experiences. Though experience is the best teacher, we don’t have to leave what we learn to chance. Boyatzis proposes that we can put ourselves in charge of our learning using a structured five-step process:
1. Understand your ideal self—The person you want to be.
2. Recognize your real self—Your actual strengths and weaknesses in the context of who you want to be.
3. Decide how to build on your strengths and reduce the gaps between your real and ideal selves.
4. Experiment with new behaviors and feelings.
5. Develop trusting relationships with people who will support your learning process.
Developing moral skills follows the same cycle of self-directed learning. In Chapter 3, “Your Moral Compass,” you had an opportunity to complete the first step of the process—you examined the contents of your principles, values, beliefs, and your goals, all of which make up the raw material of your ideal self. So you’re now ready for the next step to understand your real self—by assessing your moral strengths and weaknesses. With a full picture of your ideal self and real self, you can then be in position to craft a moral learning plan. Your moral learning plan can be your road map for gaining the moral skills that are most important to you and that promote the highest levels of business performance.
A Look in the Mirror
Most of us have some idea of our moral strengths and weaknesses. Our conscience might give us a pang if we exaggerate a business accomplishment. A friend could take us to task for being thoughtless. Or we may feel secure in our unswerving fairness to our employees. But our data about our own moral performance is usually anecdotal and incomplete. To help you identify your moral strengths and weaknesses, we have developed the Moral Competency Inventory (MCI). See Appendix B, “Moral Competency Inventory (MCI).”
Using the MCI
The MCI is a 40-item survey that you will find here and in Appendix B. It is a self-report survey; that is, you are the person who rates yourself on each item, and you are the person who decides the meaning of the results. Take the MCI when you have an hour to spend. It will take about 20 minutes to complete the survey, about 10 minutes to score, and another 30 minutes to reflect on your results.
The MCI is a self-development tool, not a test, so it does not have the scientific precision of, say, the SATs or an IQ test. But leaders who have used the MCI tell us that it helps them capitalize on their moral strengths and strengthen moral skills that are difficult for them.
It is important for the user of the MCI to understand that this instrument does not have validity as a selection tool nor as a personality test. Thus, it should be used for personal reasons only and not for any professional use by human resource professionals.
The Right Frame of Mind for Completing the MCI
The MCI items are all worded in a positive way, so there is no attempt to hide what the survey would consider to be positive behavior. Because you are rating yourself, the value of the MCI will be enhanced if you are as honest with yourself as possible. That means trying to avoid two kinds of self-rating errors:
• The tendency to give yourself a high rating on most items because they sound like positive things to do
• The tendency to give yourself low ratings on many items because you are typically hard on yourself (self-critical)
Scoring and Interpreting Your MCI
You will find scoring instructions in Appendix C, “Scoring the MCI,” and interpretation guidelines in Appendix D, “Interpreting Your MCI Scores.”
There are several different ways to look at your MCI scores. You will have an opportunity to consider your overall moral competency profile, and you also can examine specific areas where you have strength or need development. No single interpretation is correct, and no “test” is the last word on your capabilities. If any part of your MCI scores don’t ring true to you, keep in mind that you know yourself best. But if you are dissatisfied with your scores, we ask only that before dismissing them, you use your results as a springboard for honest reflection about your strengths and weaknesses.
Prioritizing Your Moral Development Efforts
There are two paths to improving your performance in any arena of life. You can concentrate on removing weaknesses, or you can focus on using your strengths. When you focus on your weaknesses, you try to improve your performance by undoing old behavior and practicing new skills or competencies. When you focus on your strengths, you try to improve performance by finding new ways to use the skills and competencies you already have.
Which path do you think is more effective? We believe you can reach higher levels of performance by capitalizing on your strengths than by trying to remove your weaknesses.
Which path do you think most organizations follow? Most organizations try to improve the performance of their workforce by concentrating on deficiencies. Our experience has been that most of the performance feedback many employees receive is negative, that is, information about perceived gaps. Organizations assume that negative feedback will create awareness of gaps that employees will then seek to improve. Ironically, negative feedback often produces the opposite effect. Studies have shown that performance often gets worse following negative feedback. It can take weeks for performance to recover to previous levels and months, if ever, to see positive gains in performance. Even though managers regularly observe that negative feedback can be counterproductive, most organizations continue to provide an excess of feedback about performance gaps. Focusing on gaps is a well-worn path, but one that rarely leads to the highest organizational performance.
The Road Less Traveled
Most organizations treat positive feedback, that is, recognition of strengths, like a scarce resource. Employees are expected to perform well, and when they use their strengths to accomplish positive results, it often passes without comment. Organizations who fail to acknowledge strengths miss out on a tremendous performance multiplier. That is unfortunate because most employees perform best by spending most of their time leveraging their strengths. It is in our strengths that we most resemble our ideal selves, and the more time we spend using our strengths, the more closely we approach our ideal self. Focusing on strengths may be “the road less traveled,” but it is the path that makes the most difference to creating high performance.
The 80/20 Rule
Management consultant Roy Geer, offers this advice: Spend 80 percent or more of your time developing and leveraging your strengths and 20 percent or less of your time “pumping air into your priority flat spots (weaknesses).”
Look for ways to leverage the moral strengths you already have. Actively use those aspects of yourself that are closest to your ideal self. For example, Marietta Johns is a senior executive who knew she was weak in the financial management aspects of her job. But she didn’t spend a lot of time trying to learn what she didn’t know. She got help from a corporate financial guru and concentrated on doing what she did best—connecting with her people and inspiring them to produce enviable financial results.
Moral development is largely a process of developing and leveraging your strongest moral competencies. You can get the most performance equity from using your strengths, but you can also benefit from spending up to 20% of your development time dealing with your gaps. By concentrating primarily on your strengths, you can also avoid the discouragement of trying to remove gaps that are part of your basic personality and difficult to change. So don’t ignore your gaps. Allocate your time wisely on the path to your ideal self.
Your Moral Development Plan
A moral development plan helps you boost your performance by increasing the odds that you will actually do the things that increase your moral competence. A moral development plan records your moral development goals and outlines specific actions you will take to become increasingly morally competent. This need not be a separate plan from a professional development plan. If you work in an organization or for a boss open to discussing principles, values, and beliefs, you may find it useful to include moral development as part of your overall development plan. The important thing is to write down the moral and emotional competencies on which you want to focus and detail the steps you will take to use those competencies. Goals for moral development, like any goals, are more likely to be achieved when you commit to them in writing.
Step 1: Describe Your Ideal Self
Moral development planning makes sense only in the context of who you want to be. Recall the principles, values, and beliefs that form your moral compass. Given that set of beliefs, what kind of person would you be if you were at your absolute best?
Again, moral development is only important if it helps you accomplish your most important goals. Recall your goals frame. What are the most significant things you want to accomplish in all of the important areas of your life?
Step 3: Identify the Moral Competencies You Need the Most
Reflect on the moral and emotional competencies that you need the most to reach your goals. If you used the alignment worksheet presented earlier, you have already completed this step.
Step 4: Leveraging Your Strongest Moral Competencies
Now recall your strongest moral and emotional competencies:
• In the course of the next six months, how can you use those competencies to get closer to your goals?
• Can you use your strengths in a new situation?
• How might you become even stronger in your use of some of those strengths?
• If it were possible to use your strengths and use them well enough, how many gaps would you actually have?
Step 5: Reducing Moral Gaps
• In the next six months, what could you do to strengthen those moral competencies in situations that are important to you?
• If you strengthened one competency, what impact would that have on your ability to accomplish your goals?
Finally, consider any other moral or emotional competencies that are highly important to accomplishing your goals:
• In the next six months, what could you do to strengthen those moral competencies in situations that are important to you?
Step 6: Your Moral Development Short List
Putting this all together, what are the three to five most important actions you can take to boost performance by developing your moral competence? Put this on a note card, enter it into your planner, or record it anywhere that you can keep it handy as a reminder of what you plan to accomplish.
Putting Your Moral Development Plan into Practice
Now that you have your short list, moving forward should be easy. But actually doing what you think is important requires that you clear the road ahead. We need to keep our behavior on course with our beliefs and goals. If you recall the alignment model, unproductive behavior is usually the result of disconnectors—those moral viruses or destructive emotions that get in the way of positive and aligned actions. So changing behavior begins with recognizing your personal disconnectors and then reprogramming yourself to stay in alignment even when moral viruses or destructive emotions threaten you.
Breaking Bad Habits
Although moral viruses and destructive emotions are major causes of misalignment, another common cause of misalignment between goals and behaviors is simply a matter of bad habits. Changing our behavior so that we do what we need to do to accomplish our goals usually means overcoming the inertia of doing things the usual way. Anyone who has tried to quit smoking or lose ten pounds knows that reprogramming behavior is not easy. Developing moral competence usually means that you have to change habits that get in the way of being moral.
Realize that doing something different will not feel natural. Don’t wait until something feels right. Do the right thing until it feels right. Expect a new behavior to feel strange or uncomfortable. Be willing to do it no matter what for x days. Build in reinforcement to tide you over until the behavior becomes second nature.
Reward Yourself for Positive Change
The best way to reinforce a new behavior is to reward yourself for doing something new. This doesn’t mean that you need to sign up for a golf or spa vacation to reward yourself for doing the right thing. It’s more along the lines of waiting for dessert until you have eaten your peas. Take the pleasures that are already part of your life and make them contingent on succeeding in the behavior changes that are part of your moral development planning. Celebrate your new behavior by going to that Friday night movie. If you have ignored your development plan for the week, stay home and pay your bills. When setting up your reward system, be sure that you use an optional activity, not a necessary activity such as exercise. You don’t want to compromise your health or well-being if you suffer a setback in your change efforts.
Surround Yourself with Positive People
Because we are wired for interdependence, we need help from others to do our best. Within Boyatzis’ theory of self-directed learning is the discovery that “you need others to identify your ideal self or find your real self, to discover your strengths and gaps, to develop an agenda for the future, and to experiment and practice.” Everyone needs the support of trustworthy friends and colleagues to help them stay true to their goals. Make sure you establish at least a few relationships with people who will tell you the truth about yourself, even when you might not want to hear it. Find trusted people who know your values and goals and will let you know when you are not living up to them. When you are attempting new behavior, let them know what changes you are trying to make and ask them to tell you if they see you falter.
Do I Really Need to Change?
Like any worthwhile activity, living in alignment takes some effort. You might wonder if you really need to change. You are, after all, a decent human being with a good track record of career accomplishment. If you are an experienced manager, you may even believe that you already know all you need to know and don’t need to learn anything new. If you are a senior manager, it has probably been a long time since you have gotten any critical feedback about your leadership skills. So why go to the trouble of trying to enhance your moral competence? Developing moral competence is every person’s job because when it comes to human behavior, there is no standing still. If you don’t continuously work on your moral development, you will lose moral competence. Think about any activity you used to enjoy that you have dropped over the years. It is not quite true that there are some things you never forget how to do, such as riding a bicycle. Get on a bike after 20 years, and you will probably gain your balance, but you certainly won’t be able to go as fast, or as far, or turn as smoothly as you did when you were young. You might still be able to pedal, but your performance won’t be what it could if you had kept on biking all those years. Maintaining and developing moral competence happens only when we keep pedaling. We need to use our strengths consistently, day after day, in pursuit of our ideal self. As our real self comes to look more and more like our ideal self, we will see the results in our personal lives and in our leadership of others.
Resist the urge to think of yourself as a finished product. Don’t let anything stand in the way of becoming your ideal self. Invest time in activities that build on your strengths and enhance your moral competence. You are in charge of your moral development, but don’t think you have to go it alone. Take advantage of personal development resources that you might not have considered in the past.
Books, Audio, and Video Media
There are many worthwhile books on the topic of principled leadership and personal growth. Reading such books is one good way to reflect on what is most important to you. For the busy manager with a long commute, books on tape are a useful way to de-stress and maintain alignment.
Workshops
Look for seminars on leadership, emotional intelligence, and values. Many senior managers think they don’t need “training.” Recognize your human fallibility and invest the time in active learning where you can benefit from the expertise of the presenters and the support of your fellow participants.
Personal Counseling
Some of us find that our moral viruses are so severe that they are seriously limiting our personal and professional effectiveness. The worst moral viruses usually arose out of traumatic childhood events. If some aspect of your life is not working for you, despite your best efforts, find a counselor or psychotherapist who can help you understand the source of your difficulties and work with you to develop more effective behavior.
Executive Coaching
Executive coaches are a particularly helpful resource for high-potential managers who want to accelerate their leadership development and for seasoned managers with moral or emotional blind spots. An executive coach understands the demands of your leadership role and the politics and culture of your organization. A coach can help you get the kind of honest feedback you need to build a development plan, keep you focused on your goals, and advise you on how to increase your leadership effectiveness. Many of the best-known Fortune 500 CEOs have benefited from their use of executive coaching services.
Endnote
1. Dan Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee. Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.