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Effective leadership has been identified as a crucial element for corporates who strive to effectively govern their entities. Effective leadership is the bedrock of effective governance. Effective leaders do not only exhibit academic prowess but also their experience and character plays an important role in the leadership style they provide.Corporates have to establish robust recruiting and evaluation system that emphasize assessment of character as a means of understanding the director’s capabilities and predicting their behaviour in future circumstances.

Considering that corporate scandals almost always point to character failures it is important to prioritize character assessments.

The ZimCode highlights that director recruitment should not be left to chance but be a well thought process as the candidate has great influence on the success or failure of the corporate.

Corporates have to prioritise selection of quality leaders during recruitment. The board, assisted by the nomination committee and the human resource departments have to play a central role in ensuring that it selects candidates who can effectively reproduce a culture of effective leadership within the entity.

The most important criteria for boards to consider when recruiting and assessing CEOs, senior executives and directors in addition to academic qualifications are character, competence and commitment.

The ZimCode identifies these qualities as the moral duties of the leader. Accordingly the ZimCode highlights: character, courage, common sense, conscience, conviction, creative, charisma, honesty, hard work, patriotism, inclusivity, and Ubuntu as important virtues that effective leaders have to uphold.

Leaders who uphold these virtues have a substantive effect on the overall performance and governance of the organisations they lead.

The board has to look beyond the academic achievements as these do not always tell the whole story.

The assessments have to be expanded to investigate the candidate’s leadership capabilities by focusing on their character.

The ZimCode highlights that in appointing leaders one has to look at, organisational, business, people and strategic competencies; therefore competence matters but it can only define what a person is capable of doing. Commitment as well is critical.

It reflects the extent to which individuals aspire to the hard work of leadership, how engaged they are in the role, and how prepared they are to make the sacrifices necessary to succeed.

But above all, character plays a bigger role for effective leadership. It determines how leaders perceive and analyse the contexts in which they operate as well as how they use the competencies they have.

It is the board’s mandate to ensure that it puts character on the corporate agenda when recruiting leaders. Boards can begin the process by ensuring that the senior leaders of the organisation are selected, evaluated and promoted based on character as well as commitment and competencies.

Directors have to influence character development in the organisations they govern especially in their formal processes of CEO appraisal and succession management.

They can also introduce character-focused discussion into their own board assessments and it has to cascade to all internal talent reviews. Basing hiring decisions on individuals’ reputations is not enough.

This is made difficult when the candidate has achieved positions of leadership prominence and possesses a sterling reputation.

It is even harder when the candidates clearly possess the competencies that are urgently needed and character assessments are overlooked.

Character is a loaded word. It is an amalgam of traits, values and virtues. Some elements of character, especially basic personality traits, are inherited, while others are acquired through early childhood development, education, experiences in both work-related and socially-related organisational settings, as well as mid-life experiences that mould character.

Other character-forming experiences include working in different international, industry or corporate cultures, as well as having great critics and mentors who are prepared to have the tough discussions that also shape character development.

Conducting a full character assessment requires a deep and wide-ranging examination of a person’s life and work history over an extensive period of time, through the investigating of the highs and lows of a business cycle, and asking very specific, pointed and often intrusive questions in both the interviewing and reference-checking processes.

It is much better to ask well-constructed, probing questions about how candidates have behaved in similar situations in the past, or how they believe they would behave in specific situations in the future.

Emphasising character assessment underscores the value and importance of impressions formed from loosely-structured interviews.

Character is revealed by how people behave in situations. It shapes the decisions that leaders make, and how these decisions are implemented and evaluated. It fluences what information executives seek out and consider, how they interpret it, how they report the information, how they implement board directives, and many other facets of governance.

There are many character traits that can be observed when a leader makes a decision. These can include: courage, accountability, justice, temperance, integrity, humility, humanity, collaboration, drive, transcendence and so forth.

The pertinent issue to observe in this is that, when a leader makes a decision does it express any of these character traits and what does it tell us about his/her character?

These observations can be used as judgement between good and bad decisions that were made by the leader.

While competencies are manifested in behaviours and we can actually measure them, character on the other hand, addresses a capability in individuals that may not yet have been tested and the evidence for which is frequently vague.

Corporates tend to avoid talking about character in the workplace because it seems such a subjective construct.

This does not have to be so, especially if we are able to describe the good and bad behaviours associated with these character dimensions in the appropriate business contexts.

The absence of ongoing meaningful discussions about character in corporates, even in critical issues such as talent recruitment, selection, development and retention and succession management tend to affect the understanding of the role that character plays in providing effective leadership to the entity.

For more information on the ZimCode contact: [email protected]