Can you outskill bad character?

“But what about someone who is just… abusive?”

I must have given hundreds of talks on power, from classrooms to boardrooms, and I can say with confidence that this question or some version of it comes up every single time.

But what about the boss who’s a straight-up narcissist? What about the politician who is just a grifter? What about the colleague who is cruel? What about the person who’s clearly, just… bad?

The specifics change but the question remains the same. And I understand why. There are bad actors out there, and they get more airtime than the overwhelming number of good, decent, and well-meaning bosses. But also because what I’m talking about — that using power well comes down to a set of learnable, practical, and developable competencies — flies in the face of how we typically think about power.

To be honest, the question of character dogs me a bit. It’s always been a sneaking little fear, one I’ve wrestled with for a while. Can you outskill bad character? Does skill even matter if the values aren’t already there? Don’t we have to assume a certain baseline of decency before any of this leadership development work means anything?

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, and what the research supports.

There is a relatively small percentage of the population with deeply entrenched character pathology. This is the clinical end of the spectrum — the truly bad actors who are largely resistant to change. For them, consequence doesn’t matter. Nor does shame or criticism. These bad actors exist, and cause real damage. But they are the minority, and they’re not whom I’m talking about.

The bigger danger — and this is what should unsettle us all — is that for most of us, character is highly contingent.

Character is rewarded. It’s shaped. It’s modeled. So where bad character shows up, you will almost always find conditions that produced it, rewarded it, or simply failed to stop it.

So my question isn’t really “can someone without good character learn to use power well?” but rather, should be, “what conditions allow good character to show up in the first place?”

And that’s not a lofty academic debate. It’s something playing out every day, in our workplaces, schools, homes, and friendship groups.

• You’ve been angling for a promotion for a while. You’re frustrated because you feel that in your company it’s more a matter of “who you know” than how good your work is. Your colleague Sandra shared an idea she had for a marketing campaign. You’re in a meeting, and before you know it, you blurt out her idea. People love it. They light up and start to run with it, clearly attributing it to you. You make a feeble attempt to give Sandra credit, but it’s lost in the commotion. You feel the acknowledgment and also a little queasy for taking the credit for her idea.
• You work in an office where conflict is never dealt with directly. Frustrated with a difficult peer, you start copying their manager on emails. You’re not deliberately trying to escalate. You just say you’re “keeping everyone in the loop,” but you’ve run out of ways to resolve things and hope someone above will notice how unreasonable your colleague is being.
• You’re in a meeting discussing promotions where Marcus is being considered. By every measurable standard, he is exceptional. But it’s also an open secret that Marcus is a little handsy. He is known to make edgy comments, gets a little too familiar with women. Nothing has ever risen to the level of a formal complaint, but everyone knows. And no one seems bothered. Do you speak up? It might backfire. Senior leadership loves Marcus, and you may be seen as an obstacle. It’s happened before. So you say nothing, and tell yourself it wasn’t your call to make, and that one voice wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
• You’re on the executive leadership team of a global technology firm. It’s a high-stress, highly competitive, deeply political environment. The company is fighting for survival against competitors, against stakeholder pressure, against massive AI disruption. And you and a colleague are at war. Unable to collaborate, barely able to speak. Your conflict is holding the company hostage. And yet you hold your position: they’re impossible and incompetent. You feel righteous and justified, even as you put your feelings ahead of what the company needs.

Each of these scenarios is commonplace. Each involves a less-than-ideal ethical choice — not speaking up, taking credit for someone else’s idea, putting self-interest ahead of your team. Does that make you a bad person?

No. You’re probably a person with good character caught in conditions that made the ethical choice very hard to make.

Most stories like these are not about narcissists or monsters but about conditions.

A recent New York Times piece covered new research on how authoritarian regimes sustain themselves. The findings came from a deep analysis of Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and 80s, and what researchers found was striking: the people who carried out the most harmful acts weren’t ideological extremists or victims of coercion. They were ordinary employees, motivated by ordinary things — a stalled career, a desire for recognition, the relief of finally feeling like “winners,” part of the group in power rather than sidelined by those who were better or brighter.

Ordinary career pressures such as wanting a promotion, a raise, to be seen as valuable were enough to push otherwise normal people to violate fundamental norms and basic morality.

This stands alongside decades of research — the Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram’s obedience studies, research on ethical fading in organizations. People stop perceiving their decisions as ethical decisions and find themselves doing things they would have found unthinkable five years earlier because of enabling conditions.

So the question about character is a question about conditions. How do we create conditions that enable the good use of power?

And we all build those conditions. Every day, through the small decisions we make about how to run a meeting, whether to give feedback, whether to reward dissent, we are creating an environment that either allows good character to surface or makes it very hard to.

• Protect the person who tells you something you don’t want to hear. It’s not just tolerating feedback or bad news, but actively rewarding and protecting the person. Thank them in the room. Reference their point. Make it visibly safe to bring you bad news, because the day you stop getting bad news is the day bad things start happening that you don’t know about. This means creating psychological safety so that mistakes can be admitted, questions asked, and difficult feedback surfaced.
• Create a culture of conflict competence. Most organizations don’t have a conflict problem; they have an avoidance problem. Conflict that can’t be named directly goes underground, where it turns into gossip, backstabbing and using the cc: function to ambush. A conflict-competent culture doesn’t mean everyone gets along; it means people have the skills and the permission to disagree directly, repair quickly, and move forward without damaging relationships and trust. This starts with how you handle disagreement in the room, whether you model directness or deflection, whether people see conflict resolved or just suppressed.
• Name cruelty when you see it, even small cruelty. The eye-roll in the meeting. The dismissive tone in an email. The joke at someone’s expense. These may seem minor but they’re not, because they become the culture. And cultures don’t become cruel suddenly, or in one moment, but become cruel in all the small moments that nobody named.
• Hold yourself to the standard you hold others to. This is perhaps the most powerful thing you can do, and also the most rare. When you make a mistake, say so. When you change your mind, explain why. When a decision you made didn’t work, own it. The gap between what leaders require of others and what they require of themselves breeds cynicism and cynicism erodes character faster than almost anything else.
• Give people real feedback. Giving honest, specific feedback, delivered with care, information that can actually be used and helps someone grow, is an act of courage and generosity. And it’s one of the most ethical things you can do as a manager.

Even though we’re living through a time when bad character is being rewarded, I believe — and research supports this — that most people, given the right conditions, will choose integrity. Because they’re human, and most humans, when the environment makes it possible, prefer to feel good about what they’re doing.