The Word We Lost: Why character is the pillar underneath everything you build

There was a time when you could say a man had character and everyone in the room knew exactly what you meant.

Read the writing of the founding fathers and the word shows up constantly. Even as recently as 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said in his "I have a Dream” speech, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The word carried weight.  It described something real, something people expected to be measured by. Somewhere between then and now, we mostly stopped using it.

We think we know why. We became an outward society. Do I have the personality? The looks? The status? The career? The 8-figure business.  The sales tactics? The marketing strategy? Do I have the car, the revenue, the following? Every one of those can be seen from the outside, and we built an entire business culture around them. We have become experts at manufacturing results.

Character cannot be seen from the outside. So it fell out of the conversation. But I fear we learned to gain teh world and lost our soul, as Jesus warned. 

Character Is Not a Compliment

Here is the first thing worth clearing up: character is neutral. Like money. Or a rock. It just is. Everyone has a character. 

When someone says a leader has character, they usually mean good character. But you have one either way. So does a business. So does a team. We even use the word about objects. A piece of wood furniture has character. It has grain and marks and particularities that make it that thing and not another one.

Your character is the sum of who you are. What you do, why you do it, what you reach for under pressure, and what you are like when nothing is at stake. It is the unseen part of you, and it does not stay unseen. It shows up in your behavior, your speech, your patterns and your decisions.

Jesus talked constantly about the heart, and not as sentiment. As the operating center of a person. Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. The inside drives the outside. We are that kind of creature whether or not we like to admit it.

Outside In, Inside Out

Here is how we have started saying it: we experience each other from the outside in, but we build ourselves from the inside out.

Think about how you encounter any organization. You meet the website first. The ad, the podcast, the post, the way somebody answered the phone. That is the outermost layer, and for most people it is the only layer they will ever experience.

But nothing on the surface was built on its own.

The messaging came from a strategy. The strategy came from a set of decisions. The decisions came from a leader, from what that person values, avoids, fears and is willing to pay for. By the time you are looking at the outside of an organization, you are looking at the confluence of a hundred internal things you will never have access to.

This is why we organize our work around three pillars in a specific order: character, then leadership, then communication. Not because they are equally visible. Because they run in that direction. Communication is the layer everyone experiences, and it is also the layer furthest from where the problem usually lives.

You Can Be Gifted and Deficient at the Same Time

There has been exactly one person with perfect character, and none of us are Him.

So the honest question is not whether you have character gaps. It is whether you know what yours are.

You can be genuinely gifted, strategic, charismatic and effective, and still be carrying something unresolved. We have all watched it happen. The businessman who builds a nine-figure company and dies alone, three marriages behind him and children who do not call. The politician who could remember your name six years after meeting you once and still could not govern his private life. The pastor who builds something extraordinary, is genuinely used by God, and never dealt with the pain or dysfunction underneath that leads to a public blow up. It’s not just normal, it's a cliche.

None of those people lacked skill. Gifting or work ethic was never the issue.

And here is the part we would rather you hear before you need it. This is not only a conversation for people at that altitude. Most of the leaders we work with would never call themselves a big deal. They are running a team under 10, or a million dollar nonprofit, or a family business somebody else started. The pressure is smaller, so the strain on the foundation is smaller. That is exactly why now is the time to look at it, while there is still slack in the system.

Integrity Is a Structural Word

When we say character, the next word we reach for is integrity. And we do not only mean that you do what you say you will do, although that is part of it.

Think about a building. A building has integrity. There are things in the structure that allow it to stand under load. When we say a leader has integrity, we are describing something similar: whether the structure holds when weight is applied.

That reframe changes the diagnosis. Often it is not that a leader has bad character. It is that something in the structure is missing and has not been needed yet. A skill they never had to build. A habit nobody taught them. A blind spot that has not cost them anything so far.

That is a very different conversation than telling someone they are a bad person. It is a conversation about load.

Why We Always Start With the Person

Most of the people who come to us come for marketing. Or leadership training. Or team performance.  Wherever the pain is felt.

Very often, inside the first conversation, it becomes clear that marketing is not what is stopping their growth.

Sometimes it genuinely is a tactic. The landing page really is bad. The meeting structure really is broken. No amount of inner work fixes a page that does not tell anyone what you do. But a lot of the time, what gets handed to us as a marketing problem is a decision nobody made, an offer nobody owns, or a skill gap nobody has named out loud.

Joshua's mentor, Dr. Coker, puts a number on it: something like three-quarters of profit, productivity and performance problems are people problems.

We believe that, and we have watched it inside our own team. When we started doing real development work with our people over the last several months, things we had been trying to fix with process started fixing themselves.

So we start with the person. Not because the tactics do not matter, but because what people meet first is never what is driving it.

"People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."
- 1 Samuel 16:7

If you are stuck, it is worth asking which of the three pillars is actually holding you. It might be your communication. It might be your leadership. But if it is the first one, nothing you fix downstream will hold for long.

Start where it is actually being built.