At Davos this year, the organisational psychologist Adam Grant said something so right that it is striking how rarely anyone says it, or possibly sees it.

On the World Economic Forum’s Radio Davos podcast, he was asked what he hoped to see change. He didn’t talk about AI, geopolitics, or productivity. Instead, he focused on the people we choose to put in positions of power. His conclusion was blunt: anyone unwilling to put the interests of the collective above their own, he said, is ‘unfit to lead’.

It is a simple test, and one we shouldn’t ignore. We pour enormous effort into assessing competence and charisma when we appoint people to the C-Suite and the board. We assess character far more rarely, and far less honestly.

Grant frames the issue through what psychologists call the dark triad: three traits that are the precise opposite of what leadership demands. The first is narcissism: a preoccupation with the self that puts ego before mission. The second is Machiavellianism: the manipulative instinct that treats people and principles as means to an end. The third is psychopathy: a thin or absent capacity to care about anyone else.

The trouble is that these traits often arrive disguised as strengths. We mistake confidence for competence and dominance for vision. In uncertain times, Grant notes, we are drawn most strongly to the forceful figure who makes us feel safe, only to learn, once their interests part ways with ours, that they cannot be trusted.

Those who write about board governance will recognise the pattern immediately. I recently co-authored an article which argues that boards recruit for the wrong things. Too often, decisions rest on chief executive ‘pedigree’, financial acumen, and a comfortable sense of ‘good fit’, while overlooking what actually makes a strong director: courage, scepticism, independence, and the willingness to be unpopular. The skills that make someone a decisive operator do not necessarily make them a good governor. Grant points to the same blind spot at a deeper level. We continue to elevate the confident, charismatic, and dominant candidate and call it leadership, when in some cases we reward little more than self-interest.

This is not a case for softer leadership. Quite the reverse. The best leaders I have worked with are decisive, ruthlessly commercial, and willing to make difficult calls and stand behind them. Grant’s distinction does not concern toughness, but purpose. Are you forcing through a difficult decision because it produces the better outcome for the business, its shareholders, its customers, and its people? Or because it serves you? Decisiveness in service of the mission is leadership. Decisiveness in service of the self is something else.

The question of integrity comes down to where a leader draws the line, and whether they hold it when doing so carries a cost.

Few roles feel that pressure more acutely than the General Counsel. The General Counsel sits at an exposed crossroads: adviser to the chief executive, guardian of the company’s legal and ethical posture, and increasingly a commercial leader expected to enable the deal rather than merely paper it. Those roles do not always align. In practice, the role often comes under intense pressure to get to ‘yes’, to soften an opinion, to let something through because the quarter depends on it, because the founder wants it, because everyone in the room has already made up their mind. It is precisely there that values get tested. Not in the easy cases, but in the ones where principle carries a price. It is a tension worth examining in the open, and one we will be taking up in London in June as part of our Knowledge and Networking Series.

This is why character belongs at the centre of senior appointments, not added as a cultural footnote. A board’s most important job is choosing and overseeing the people at the top. If we prioritise charisma and commercial firepower while treating integrity as secondary, the outcome should not surprise us. Grant’s observation about workplaces is instructive. Organisations tend to promote on individual results alone, which is exactly how the self-serving rise. A better measure, he argues, is your impact on others. Did this person make the team better, or extract from it?

Applied to the boardroom, the question sharpens further. We should ask candidates not only what they have delivered, but what they refused to do, and what it cost them. The leader who can point to a moment they held the line, walked away from a deal, or gave an unwelcome opinion reveals something no benchmark can.

Grant’s wish for the year is that boards and voters alike will put their foot down and insist that character matters as much as competence and charisma. The question was never simply whether someone is brilliant, or bold, or commercially gifted. It is what they do with those qualities when nobody is watching, and the easy path serves only themselves.