We can spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to reach the top and find the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
What Is Virtue?
Who doesn’t want to excel? Virtue has defined excellence for centuries, but it isn’t virtue until we act. We can practice it because character, unlike personality traits, is chosen.
Personality is our tendencies. Virtue is our principles. We don’t choose our tendencies, that is how we are wired. We do choose our principles.
Since 1961, five personality traits have held up across more than fifty cultures, with roughly half inherited: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Nobody chooses that hand, and traits shift slowly only under sustained effort.
Character defined by virtue is something we can choose today. Virtue is the stable habit of character that lets a person act well, relate well, and live well over time. The act is available today. The habit takes longer. It’s practiced in relationships, in the friction and trust of working alongside others, under pressure. That is where character is tested and built.
What the ancients knew, science has confirmed
What the ancients knew, science has confirmed. In 2004, Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman published a three-year project involving 55 leading social scientists. They concluded that the same core character strengths appear across cultures and across history, and that they are foundational to flourishing. The virtues point to a well-worn, 25-century old path toward excellence, as opposed to the latest management fad.
The virtues point to a well-worn, 25-century old path toward excellence, as opposed to the latest management fad.
The First Pillar: Character
Character determines how well leaders, teams, and cultures build relationships and perform. Competence establishes the baseline; character sets the ceiling by magnifying the competence already present.
The Second Pillar: Relationships
Relationships are the foundation of performance. Relationships built on virtue release effort no rule could command. Rules without relationships lead to rebellion.
Rules without relationships lead to rebellion.
The Third Pillar: Purpose
Purpose commits us to something larger than ourselves. A practical question we can ask is what does this time require of me? Purpose is where engagement becomes visible. People look around, see what needs to be done and who they need to work with, and they own it. Becoming more useful points us toward the practice of virtue.
We studied the impact of these pillars on engagement for over three years across two Parker Hannifin locations. Both locations had low engagement scores. After the initial training, engagement dipped further until teammates experienced that the initiative was real. Then after leaders learned how to integrate virtue and the science of high performance into daily operations, engagement rose 20 percent year over year from the original base.
The Seven Virtues in Practice
We can’t remember paragraphs, but we can remember catchphrases. One for each virtue:
- Trust is efficient.
- Compassion: service before self.
- Courage: do the hard right, not the easy wrong.
- Justice: live by conviction, not circumstance.
- Wisdom: strive to understand rather than be understood.
- Temperance: calm is contagious.
- Hope: be better, not bitter.
Consider a time when these behaviors were present, and a time when they were absent. How did it impact performance?
When we get better at who we are, we get better at what we do.