Integrity on parade
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Integrity. An easy thing to say you have. A wise thing to represent in your speaking and positioning, but a really hard thing to actually live. A recent article in Fast Company’s Leadership series speaks to this point, outlining the need to have integrity in all of your aspects of your business – mission, function, team, compensation, security. All really obvious things to say. Much harder to do.
Today, I’m not going to give my answer on how to deliver all of these things. What I am going to do is name just how hard integrity (in any or all of these things) really is to attain and maintain.
The external forces on leaders and their businesses are unbelievable. Between shareholders, customers, and the media, you slip up one time and your either facing a sell off, a drop in market share, or a front page story telling how much of a bastard you are.
Add your employees to the mix, and you have to worry about quality and efficiency of output, and then morale, and ultimately your competitive edge.
It’s easy to say you have integrity as a leader, but are you telling the truth? Either to yourself or all of those around you? We have seen examples of high profile leaders who can look you straight in the eye and lead you to believe that they are doing to best thing and the right thing for everyone, and then end up indicted for embezzling, faking the figures, and lining their offshore accounts with company and shareholder dollars. They, thank goodness, are the aberration, not the norm.
That leaves the rest of us. I truly believe that nearly every leader and manager with whom I am working is genuinely doing the best that he or she can for reasons that are generally good. Most people are not out to advance themselves at the expense of everyone else. But even for these people, I push them to really question themselves about what their personal definition of integrity is and check in to see if their actions and words line up with their statements of integrity.
How would yours do?
Today, I’m not going to give my answer on how to deliver all of these things. What I am going to do is name just how hard integrity (in any or all of these things) really is to attain and maintain.
The external forces on leaders and their businesses are unbelievable. Between shareholders, customers, and the media, you slip up one time and your either facing a sell off, a drop in market share, or a front page story telling how much of a bastard you are.
Add your employees to the mix, and you have to worry about quality and efficiency of output, and then morale, and ultimately your competitive edge.
It’s easy to say you have integrity as a leader, but are you telling the truth? Either to yourself or all of those around you? We have seen examples of high profile leaders who can look you straight in the eye and lead you to believe that they are doing to best thing and the right thing for everyone, and then end up indicted for embezzling, faking the figures, and lining their offshore accounts with company and shareholder dollars. They, thank goodness, are the aberration, not the norm.
That leaves the rest of us. I truly believe that nearly every leader and manager with whom I am working is genuinely doing the best that he or she can for reasons that are generally good. Most people are not out to advance themselves at the expense of everyone else. But even for these people, I push them to really question themselves about what their personal definition of integrity is and check in to see if their actions and words line up with their statements of integrity.
How would yours do?
