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Listen to The Closer, Cash from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green. Today I'm talking with

Fred Kiel, author of the new book Return on Character, The Real Reason Leaders and

their Companies Win. Fred, thank you so much for talking with us today.

Hi, very welcome, Sarah.

So the book is based on a really interesting study you conducted of more than 100 CEOs and 8,000 employee observations of those CEOs. And I thought we could just

start by, you know, hearing a little bit about your findings.

Sure, I'd be glad to. We found that strong character leaders contributed amazing almost five times bottom line profitability as do the weak character leaders and they enjoy a much higher level of workforce engagement, like 26% higher, and they also have a significant impact on reducing corporate risk to the company.

So those are the three big headlines of the objective data and then we also discovered

a lot about character and what it is and how it can be changed.

So I sort of love the headline there that nice guys can finish first.

How did you decide kind of what traits exactly make up someone with a lot of character?

Well, we stand on the shoulders of a lot of research that has gone on before, specifically in the field of cultural anthropology.

Cultural anthropologists have studied what human cultures have in common around the world, what they all share, and it turns out that there is a set of

moral principles that are universal among all cultures around the globe and so

we selected four of those that we thought would be pretty important

in leadership, for our integrity and responsibility, sort of two of the head, and then two of the

heart, forgiveness and compassion. And we created behavioral

descriptors of those four principles and then use those by surveying employees and asking them to rape those behaviors on the part of their

CEOs and their senior teams.

So when you talk about the importance of forgiveness there, I feel like that is one that might strike some people as surprising because I think we talk a lot about accountability and leadership. We don't talk as much about forgiveness. So tell me a little bit more about why you included that one.

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