For more than 25 years I have been having this conversation in rooms that looked very different from each other. City council chambers. Employer roundtables. The Capitol. The conversation is always the same: professional character is not a soft skill. It is infrastructure. And the numbers prove it.

Most organizations can feel the character gap before they can name it. The exit interview said it was the commute. It is almost always something else. Here is what the character gap is actually costing your organization.