Le caractère et non la conformité, avec Edward Brooks

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to point out this area of connection in terms of having a parent as a teacher across other interviews. My mother was a public school teacher for 30-plus years and a special education teacher, and I always find when engaging with people who had parents who were themselves public school teachers or they were close to school teachers growing it is always something that gets raised. I have always found these people really privileged values.

EDWARD BROOKS: Absolutely. I think that’s right. It is such an important role in society.

KEVIN MALONEY: Building on your value system and pivoting to your career as a researcher, people who listen to this podcast will have heard the conversation I had with Carnegie Council President Joel Rosenthal where we talked about his intellectual formation at the intersection of ethics and international affairs, and he talked a lot about the thinkers Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr and the concepts of realism and ethics together in international relations. I want to bluntly pose the question to you: In terms of the thinkers that underpin your own research, who would be your Morgenthau?

EDWARD BROOKS: I am certainly influenced by that realist tradition but also by classical thinkers, by Aristotle significantly, but Aristotle with Augustine and Aquinas, by contemporary or 20th-century leaders, and Dag Hammarskjöld is someone I admire incredibly and the inner work you see in Markings is incredible for a political leader of the United Nations.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his book Ethics was very significant when I read it, especially the ethic of responsibility. Those would be some of them, but I read widely and love biographies, often on sports people I admire or political figures.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting that you raise these examples of leadership like Dag Hammarskjöld and others. The early years of the United Nations are particularly interesting from a leadership perspective. At the Council we think a lot about Ralph Bunche and his role at leading the United Nations and his influence on UN peacekeeping. It goes to this key question about how to lead and the importance of moral leadership.

Next I have a branding question that will transform maybe into a more substantive question. At the Council we sit at this unique place where we are an ethics organization but we are not embedded in a university. You look around the world and see ethics professional organizations and ethics centers, and then you see The Oxford Character Project, which you lead as executive director. I have a two-part question: In terms of The Oxford Character Project I want to ask specifically around branding: Why use this term “character” in the name? Why isn’t it the “Oxford Ethics Project” or the “Oxford Virtue Project?”

EDWARD BROOKS: Character is central in leadership that advances good in society. That is a commitment which stretches back into classical philosophy, was renewed in the Renaissance, and was commonplace in higher education until the 20th century. As the model of higher education changed and more prominently economics in higher education grew, we struggled to articulate the value set formation of students in universities.

The idea of character slipped off the agenda of universities practically speaking. It is still there in the aspiration of many universities. We have done research, and university websites around the world talk about this idea very clearly—“developing citizens” and citizen leaders to serve society, “kinds” of people and not just people who can contribute to economies with skills and knowledge.

Here at Oxford we talk about how students can develop values and intellectual disciplines as well as the skills that they need. This is common, but it became hard for universities to do perhaps in a liberal context where values are contested, but it is still very, very important, and the importance was brought home to us very clearly in Oxford after the financial crash and the leadership crisis globally which was well reported and has carried on, but even then there was this loss of trust that was well reported in leaders, and the question of: “Well, what are we doing to help our students to lead wisely, to lead well, and to lead in ways which advance important societal goods around the world in ways which embody humility, courage, hope, empathy, and so on?”

We set about focusing on this aspect of who our students were becoming and working with them to do that, asking other questions: “Who would you like to be?” “What influence would you like to have on the world?” and “Who do you need to be to do what you want to do?” These are the character questions.

Of course there are different ways of approaching ethics. Ethical frameworks don’t necessarily have to compete with each other, but during the 20thcentury the dominant paradigms are more consequentialist and deontological and think about rules, regulations, and compliance, but the character perspective has perhaps slipped away.

The philosophy of that came back from the 1960s and onward with the revival of virtue ethics that has come into education increasingly, and that is the tradition that we sit within, focusing then on the human dimension of the ethical task, this developmental perspective, not just regulatory ethics as a limited set of rules or code of conduct but the bigger picture about the “good life,” a flourishing life and flourishing society and what it means to live well.

KEVIN MALONEY: One of the difficult areas right now for Carnegie Council, especially in this geopolitical environment, is the splintering of value systems and all the baggage that comes with that geopolitically when you are trying to come to an agreement. We try to start at the level above value systems, which is the universality of human beings, and then you go in to interrogate value systems from there.

The thing about character I found interesting in reading your work is that values can oftentimes be conflated with a larger group or society. They have an individual aspect in the public mindset, but character is extremely personal. I wonder if you could talk about the value of focusing on that extremely personal point through character and that framing, and what that can unlock in terms of better leaders, more responsible policies, et cetera.

EDWARD BROOKS: That is an important observation.

Perhaps we can back up a second to think in terms of the way in which ethical leadership is often thought about. This idea in the corporate world and policy world is often thought about as “following the rules.” Ethical leadership is about not committing fraud, malpractice, not lying, and following a code of conduct. It is a flawed way of thinking. It is a way of limiting risks and limiting liability. What it is not is a vision for excellence.

What we have found through our work at The Oxford Character Project is that this approach which focuses on limiting formal misconduct actually limits the meaning of ethics and limits the potential of ethics. It limits the meaning of ethics to rules, consequences. This is a zeros-and-ones approach to ethics.

Of course, since the classical world ethics has also been about the good. It has been an aspirational idea of what it means to have a good life, be a good person, be a good citizen, and how can we get the best out of ourselves as human beings, how can we flourish in society. It is a developmental idea, zeros to tens, growth, building. It is very much aspirational. It limits the meaning of ethics.

This current framework of ethical leadership very often also limits the potential of ethics because ethics of course can go beyond compliance, which is about the rules of the game, to performance. I think better understood ethics is about better thinking, better relationships, and so better outcomes. This changes the script somewhat in a way which I think is exciting, and this is what we have been focusing on here in our work and our research.

It is amazing. As we have gone out and done open research with businesses in the United Kingdom asking participants for understandings of good leadership, a survey of 1,300 people in over 30 businesses identified character qualities. Over 52 percent of the qualities identified were character qualities. This is very important to people, so it is there, but it is not often brought to the fore. I think we can focus on that much more effectively, and opening up our idea of ethics can help us to get the best out of ourselves individually and collectively in some exciting ways.

There is so much potential in us as human beings and individuals; how can we optimize that, of course not neglecting the institutional, the contextual, societal, and systemic factors, but what about individuals and how we relate to each other and the cultures we make? Can we come back to this character base?

KEVIN MALONEY: I think you hit the nail on the head. For us at the Council too it is getting past this idea of ethics as something to be done, a burden, or punitive. At any point in life when you frame something in that way there is going to be a “Let me get this over with” mentality, not a “Let me embrace this” mentality.

We see it in the room here, where we get people who normally would not sit together in a political arena and they sit together under the umbrella of ethics to hash things out. Not only is it more approachable, but the end goal is a level of personal reflection in a good-faith way but also an outward engagement with other people, finding a community of other people who want to do that. That for us is where the domino effect happens. It is the ability to do it from an individual perspective, and then you find that good-faith community and the dominos start to fall. I think there is a lot of work to be done around the branding and public perception of ethics in particular.

EDWARD BROOKS: That can come out of our practice as we are able to host the kinds of conversations you are talking about and approach ethics in these ways. Thinking about character and not just compliance we can move and engage ethics in terms of our habits of attention, imagination, moral courage, and so on in ways which can be exciting and enlightening. We can start with a conversation about ethics and integrate that with a conversation about excellence, not as a side constraint but as something which is fundamental to what good leadership is about, not just avoiding the bad. Holding up examples as we find them can be amazingly powerful. I think there is a task to do that in our time, lifting up good where we see it in business, government, and in civil society where people’s ethical commitments strengthen their impact because in the end ethics is not the enemy of ambition; it is very much the path to deeper, more sustainable, more human forms of success.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is very difficult to be on the “ethical island,” I have found. You have to bring people along in good faith, and then there are those moments when you are grappling with a very difficult decision and you know the outcome is going to be better if you just grapple with it, but doing this alone is extremely difficult. For me focusing on building a community of practice at the Council that people come through feels like a warm blanket at night.

If the book hasn’t been written yet or the op-ed on character and not compliance, I am plugging that you should definitely do that.

I want to pivot now to a recent book you edited called The Arts of Leading: Perspectives from the Humanities and the Liberal Arts. We talked about this in terms of how ethics and character are thought of as this burden in a way. On the other side of it in this media ecosystem we have this commercialization of leadership. This has been going on for decades now in terms of books, but now you go on YouTube, you get the 30-second short on how to be a good leader, and there is this multibillion-dollar industry, but we are not empirically seeing better outcomes. Can we talk about this gap and maybe diagnose some of the issues you are seeing and some of the things that were highlighted in the book?

EDWARD BROOKS: It is remarkable, isn’t it? We have invested billions into leadership development, and yet at top of mind and top of the newsfeed we see that we are not perhaps educating across society the kinds of leaders we would like. What is going wrong? There is no shortage of content—books, media, training programs—and yet perhaps we have not got wise judgment, moral courage, and public trust.

This is exactly the gap we are trying to address in The Arts of Leading, which is an edited book with Michael Lamb, a fantastic colleague at Wake Forest University leading the program for leadership and character in Winston-Salem. We draw on colleagues from across the arts and humanities to contribute perspectives.

What we argue in the book is that the way we think about leadership is too narrow. It is dominated by a corporate mindset that equates leadership with technical skills and bottom-line performance. Those are the metrics. But leadership is more than those metrics. It is a deeply human, ethical, and cultural practice.

If you want to engage a deeply human, ethical, and cultural practice, of course research methods from the social sciences are going to be helpful, and people who are leading firms need how-to guides in different ways. This is not to say that there is nothing good at all in those literatures and areas of research, but to probe these human dimensions we turn to the arts and humanities. That is what the book seeks to do.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to push a little bit on this bottom-line metrics point. We have seen this permeate through the corporate space and corporate America. I think about the Jack Welch, CEO leadership book guidelines, where it is efficiency, trimming the fat, and this approach to corporate leadership that began in the 1980s.

Can you highlight some of the thinkers from the book who provide an antidote, prescription, or a strong alternative to this perspective that the bottom line is the end-all and be-all? I see a lot of parallels in the international relations space to this point when people argue that power is the end-all and be-all and don’t ask the question, “Power to what end?”

At the Council we think about this a lot and how we take these moral questions and make them inform the power side. From your perspective, how do we take these moral questions and have them inform the bottom-line thinking or the business ecosystem?

We think about this at the Council in terms of inserting this into the thinking and framing of someone maybe in the White House Situation Room or a diplomat at the United Nations. Maybe we can think about that framing and tackle the question of how you insert morals into the bottom-line ecosystem or bottom-line equation.

EDWARD BROOKS: The book has chapters from history, literature, philosophy, religion, visual arts, performing arts, and classics as well. It ranges very broadly.

What we are seeking to do is see how leadership has been understood through the centuries and across different areas of the humanities in its richness as we start to push, probe, and engage with these areas of inquiry, which show us human life, and answer questions such as: “Who are the leaders in your organization?”

If you have an organizational structure—and many organizations do—which has a pyramid view of leadership and it is there, you have your ex co and you have your L-100, the top 100 leaders, and your L-500, whatever it is, basically going into smaller and smaller groups, but your real leader is one person, the CEO, and it goes down from there. This seems crazy to me. Of course that is one way to look at positional leadership.

Perhaps we could also recognize that there is an aspect here which is behavioral. There is behavioral leadership, regardless of position. If you can ask, “Who are the leaders in your organization?” and if everyone just says, “There are five leaders in our organization,” does that mean that none of the rest of us are going to be thinking that we are leaders?

What about flipping that? If you could have many more people in your organization thinking, We are able to lead here, and taking the kinds of initiatives to identify challenges, motivate others, assume responsibility, deliver on outcomes, and exercise their imagination, moral courage, and so on, I think that would be amazing.

For example, one of the chapters in the book approaches this from the perspective of history and ethnography. Marla Frederick is the current dean of divinity at Harvard Divinity School. She is an ethnographer by training and she dug into the archives of a Baptist church in Sumter, South Carolina in the research she did for their anniversary. There was a well-told story of who was leading the church, which were the people whose portraits had been on the walls since the very beginning, the senior leaders.

In the archives she found actually the story of three women whose names had not been known and who in one document were described as “the ones who organized the church.” Their names were Minnie Blair, Tilda Bush, and Mary Marshall. I always tell this as the story of the “leadership of Bush and Blair” because it is this amazing story of people you had not heard of being the ones doing the work. In the chapter Marla talks about this and says leadership is about who gets the work done, who advances the cause of the institution, and who creates a vision for future generations.

I think that applies directly into organizations. Who is actually doing the work, and what does that mean? How should we structure organizationally, whether your organization is a business organization, a political party, or if we are thinking about wider society? How can we start to reimagine leadership in these ways? I think the effect could be amazingly empowering for people who are there doing that good work and have a massive performance benefit for organizations as well because it would motivate and mobilize many more people to work beyond their job descriptions.

KEVIN MALONEY: Wow. There is so much to digest there in terms of thinking about and challenging the way we view institutional structures. I hear that story and don’t immediately think about the institution but the individuals who clearly found deep personal and professional value in their work, even though they did not receive public recognition for it. Ironically, and I think this is anecdotal, the “corporate reward structure” right now and the way that society values or does not value individuals is quite performative; think about the congratulatory LinkedIn post that everybody claps and reacts to.

Beyond performance, the question becomes, how can institutions better create environments where the Minnies, Tildas, and Marys of the world can thrive and find value in their work while simultaneously that institution creates the reward and recognition structures that showcase that work and advances them as individuals.

Right now these two things seem to be more and more detached from one another, the institutional reward structure and the value of the individual work. How do we get a reward structure that prioritizes or how can we work toward such a structure that prioritizes both character and bottom-line performance? I am sure we could go on a long time about this, but I would be interested in your comments and reaction to that.

EDWARD BROOKS: This isn’t a gimmick. It is talking about something which is deep and substantive and cannot just be adopted into the modified paradigm—we do address this in the book.

Sometimes the humanities can have a quick and dirty of taking up—“We’ll draw on Shakespeare, use an example, and there we go,” to basically endorse the current leadership model we have already and it fits in, and this can instrumentalize the humanities. We were keen to take a different approach in the book which is about not instrumentalizing the humanities in the existing paradigm but allowing the humanities to open up our paradigm and give us different, new, and human perspectives. That means I guess getting comfortable with the reality that there are not always easy and direct answers which are going to tell us the solution to our current problem, but they may work on us and help us to see things differently, which can as we live through that reframe the kinds of challenges we are facing and open up many possible solutions.

KEVIN MALONEY: From my perspective—obviously this is a mid-career perspective and there is a lot of privilege attached to having this perspective—I know I feel the most satisfied not when you get a callout in the staff meeting or your boss sends you a “Good job!” It’s when you know you have done a good job. It’s that moment you walk back to your desk after an event or after you have presented and say, “Good job” to yourself. There is a satisfaction there.

We live in the real world too, and this is where the realism comes in. There is a need for the public affirmation in order for the people who are doing the good work to advance a lot of times in these institutions.

We could go on for a long time, but it is such an interesting dynamic from an individual ethics perspective as well as thinking about the larger institutional questions of how organizations are constructed and run and how individuals are rewarded beyond monetary and traditional promotions.

EDWARD BROOKS: Senior leaders are exemplars of character as well. As I think about it, there is that inner voice, so, yes, you talk about it right, Kevin, knowing you have done a good job and that being important, but I also find that there is a sense that certain people’s affirmation is particularly important. Why? Because they are the kind of leader I would like to become.

We see that in organizations. The power of exemplars and role models was a repeated theme as we interviewed people across organizations for a major piece of work we did a couple of years ago, and I think it is part of this dynamic. Yes, we need to have systems, but it is the personal dynamics that are there that are important, and if you make a system that does not mean that those things can disappear. They have to be in there with it.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is a great point. It is not just general affirmation you, I, or others might be seeking. It is affirmation from the people you look up to from a character perspective that for many is critically important.

We have talked a lot about individual leadership, character, and more optimal or responsible institutional structures in business or generally working within the job market, but I want to zoom out to the level of geopolitics. At The Oxford Character Project you are currently doing some research examining hope within politics and the broader multilateral system. This is an interesting moment I think to be doing such research because it is a moment I will argue of transition that we find ourselves in geopolitically.

Right now, from the Council’s perspective and I think from a U.S. foreign policy perspective, we are seeing a transition to a more transactive and extractive approach to geopolitics, where values or the values-based connections between traditional allies are de-prioritized in favor of a more raw dealmaking approach.

From a leadership perspective you have talked and written about the difference between a “transformational” leader versus a “transactive” leader. This would be a leader you feel you haveto do something for versus a leader you want to follow or do something for. The question with that rather long windup is: If we are de-prioritizing the transformational leader model and if we are de-prioritizing values in the practice of geopolitics, what does this mean in the long term?

EDWARD BROOKS: These are the big questions.

The distinction is important. Getting clear on this, transactional and transformational is the paradigm. This comes in leadership studies from James MacGregor Burns in the late 1960s. He is a key pioneer of contemporary leadership studies and formed this bifurcation of transactional leadership. I think he talked about “transforming,” but that became “transformational” leadership afterward.

Transactional leadership is about exchange: “You do X; I give you Y. I give you these benefits, votes, there is the exchange, work/salary exchange, policy alignment/strategic advantage exchange.” This model is pragmatic. It is short-term.

It is not all bad. Part of life works transactionally like this, and it can be effective in stable environments. If you think about the way management science developed in the 20th century in the paradigms of scientific management, this was often a way of operating and a way of thinking how you could get the best out of people, but it doesn’t engage the deeper human questions, and this is the point.

Transformational leadership is rooted in shared purpose. It is about elevating people, leaders and followers, to higher levels of operating about motivation, morality, and values. Here this invites people not just into a deal or an exchange but a shared narrative. It creates a “we” and it creates a mission and a purpose larger than the present moment, so it has a potential for growth and development.

The very transactive way we are operating at the moment is worrying. Why? It could produce short-term leverage, but it can also erode trust, weaken important alliances, and erode decades of good and important work to create a stable and ordered, relatively speaking, world society where things are developing positively, although there is still much more to be done.

The danger is that by taking a transactive approach things that were very hard won over a long period get very quickly broken down and prove very difficult to rebuild, and I believe they will have to be rebuilt if we are to actually live on the human values we have been seeking to.

That is the moment we came to after the Second World War. Where did it start? It started with a reassertion of common humanity and human dignity: How can we preserve a society that preserves these things and seeks to understand them more and more deeply and build out our common life around the world based on them?

I think it is a worrying moment if we just start to lead in ways which are transactive and transactional, but actually it is based in a deeper underlying paradigm, which is the thing that could perhaps be challenged effectively.

It is a scarcity mindset which underlies this. I think it is a mindset of deficit, somewhat a mindset of fear and anxiety, and the world does seem to be in a place where there is a lot of uncertainty and a lot to be anxious about, but if we could start to recognize the other side of the story, the ways that we have grown, the development that has taken and is taking place, and the good things that are happening around us, then maybe we would be able to recognize rationally that there is a lot more in the world than this scarcity mindset allows for, that we do live in a world fundamentally of abundance.

Things are not zero sum. What our role here perhaps is to not simply secure the deal for the present moment but to think about how we can play our part in contributing to a future for ourselves and our families but also to society and the generations that will follow. I think this is a major, major challenge, but it comes down to underlying mindsets and ontologies even.

KEVIN MALONEY: You had some great points there that I think go to the heart of what we do at the Council. It definitely resonated with me.

The irony of the transaction is that, as you said, it erodes trust, so when you go back to get the next transaction with less trust, then it erodes again and there is a domino effect. If there is no trust there and transactions can’t happen, what is the other option? The other option is force or might, and we have seen that play out in history.

It has been very interesting for me personally—I mentioned this on the last podcast I did—growing up in the 1990s and having this almost utopian American perspective of the international system and being isolated, even compared to my father and his generation being drafted for Vietnam. There were moments like 9/11 that shook one’s worldview, but nothing has been quite like it has been in the last few months and years from an American perspective.

I mentioned last time in another podcast that especially for people who are working on issues of character and ethics it is reduced down not to this moral philosophy but the “toddler test,” as I say, in terms of how to treat people. We are in this moment when you feel almost like you are going crazy a little bit in terms of at the most basic human level this does not seem beneficial or right and then having it scale all the way up to the highest levels of the private sector or government. It is moment that is very difficult to navigate.

This almost goes back to the “ethical handcuffs” conundrum. For the people who are working on it, how do you get past the basic understanding of what’s happening right now and then work the problem?

EDWARD BROOKS: The danger of this moment is that we exist in a state of perpetual diagnosis and don’t take the proactive steps to keep leading well and actually doing the good work. This is why I think your work is terrific in bringing people together and engaging at the level of values in working through the narratives that are going to be able to bring people with opposition positions together around tables and into alliance in service of important goods. It is this work which is going to underlie and build the foundations for our shared political futures, I believe.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to close with a question about the state of higher education and universities in particular. You are at Oxford. This is one of the renowned universities in the world, and right now we are seeing higher education, especially in the United States, deal with incredible issues internally on campus but also external pressures from other power centers including government that have not been there in the modern era.

From a UK and Oxford perspective, how are you thinking about this moment in terms of the challenges to higher education, the place for higher education, and the value add of higher education in this moment?

EDWARD BROOKS: There is no doubt that universities are being tested. In our context in the United Kingdom there is a major challenge around funding for higher education, and that exists globally.

At the same time, the global story on universities and higher education is one of significant growth. I think the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) figure is 240 million people around the world are in tertiary education, which is 42 to 46 percent enrollment and growing approximately one percent a year.

The overall picture is exciting of educational growth. That is uneven, of course, and needs to be focused and channeled into parts of the world that have not had the privilege and opportunities perhaps that have existed in the United Kingdom and the United States.

There is an opportunity as well at the same time for universities. Perhaps there is a moment where we think: Okay, funding is squeezed, the pressure is on—political pressures, pressures from student populations—and differing ways of operating in regard to expressing views and opinions needs a better and more robust dialog on difficult issues. If we can push into some of these challenges there is a real opportunity, and I think they are too big to neglect. Universities have such an amazing role in society to educate and develop not only world-leading research but world leaders, and that is not just those who will be positioned at the top of their countries; it is them, but it also those who will lead us across society and into the future.

Leaning into that, seizing that, and recognizing that that has a central character component and being unafraid of that and unafraid of the values questions—I think it is evident now that we cannot avoid them, so why not lead into them where perhaps we have shied away from them previously. Leaning into these questions of values and character I think could be an exciting opportunity for universities now to seize upon and play their part.

KEVIN MALONEY: Thanks so much, Ed. I always try to end these conversations on a positive note, and I think you have taken us to exactly where we want to be. What I am going to take away as a closing point is that the opportunity for universities in this challenging moment is thinking about harnessing values, leaning into values, and leaning into questions around character and not avoiding it, as we talked about earlier, and not approaching it in a minimal way of standards or as a punitive thing to be avoided. I think if we can give our listeners that final positive framing that is a great way to wrap it up today.

EDWARD BROOKS: Thanks, Kevin, and thanks for the conversation today. It has been terrific to talk to you. Thank you for all you are doing at Carnegie Council.