Character and Leadership

The expectation that business furthers the good of society is fast becoming a norm. Good business means prioritising purpose along with profit, and taking seriously the responsibility to care for employees, customers, communities, and the natural world.

This places new demands on leaders. It calls for an authentic commitment to responsible leadership that places purpose and people at the heart of operations. It depends on leaders who not only profess important values but possess the strengths of character needed to put them into practice.

Developing leaders with character qualities such as resilience, kindness, humility, honesty, and hope is central to embedding responsible business practices across organisations. Yet despite huge investment in leadership development in recent years, there is no consensus as to what character qualities are most important and how businesses can help their people to develop them.

Character and Responsible Leadership was a 3-year landmark research initiative, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and involving academics from across the University of Oxford working in conjunction with experienced business leaders and experts from other universities. Its focus was on the sectors of tech, law, and financial services, as well as business more broadly. The input and involvement of organisations from these sectors ensured the relevance of our work, and the Forward Institute partnered with us to help drive industry impact.

We adopted a mixed-methods approach to explore the science and art of character and leadership development, combining rigorous empirical research from the social sciences with new advances in measurement technologies. We conducted qualitative analysis of 120 In-depth interviews with people from across business functions and at all levels of organisations, and surveyed 1,158 participants working in 36 different firms around the UK.