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Integrity

Integrity-Based Leadership

by Ron Potter November 19, 2018

To have a great organization, integrity must be widespread.

So what does this look like?

As leader, you are the key. Integrity and trust are inseparable; one cannot exist without the other. According to Charles O’Reilly and Karlene Roberts,

Leaders who build trusting relationships within their team are willing to consider alternative viewpoints and to make use of other people’s expertise and abilities. They feel comfortable with the group and are willing to let others exercise influence over group decisions. In contrast, managers in a distrustful environment often take a self-protective posture. They’re directive and hold tight the reins of power. Those who work for such managers are likely to pass the distrust on by withholding and distorting information.

How does integrity-based leadership work?

In a research study, several groups of business executives were asked to be involved in a role-playing exercise. The groups were given identical factual information about a difficult policy decision, and then they were asked to solve a problem related to that decision. Half of the groups were briefed to expect trusting behavior from the members of their group; the other half were told to expect untrusting behavior (“You cannot openly express feelings or differences with members of your group”).

After thirty minutes of discussion, each group member as well as those who had observed the role playing completed a questionnaire. The responses were in harmony with each other: The discussions among members in the high-trust group were significantly more positive than the discussions among members of the low-trust group. In fact, people in the low-trust group who tried to be open and honest were virtually ignored. Hostility was caused by a mere suggestion, and it quickly spread throughout the group. The people in the low-trust groups realized that the lack of trust kept them from high achievement. They did not feel free to be vulnerable due to the actions and rejection of other group members.

Here are some findings on the high-trust group:

Members were more open about their feelings.
Members experienced greater clarity of thinking.
Members searched for more alternative courses of action.
Members reported greater levels of mutual influence on outcomes.

The high-trust group opened the gate of personal vulnerability, and the result was a better team and a model of integrity-based leadership.

When people do not trust one another, it is difficult for the organization to succeed and for the people within the organization to feel completely fulfilled. People who feel trusted and who trust their leaders are more satisfied, and their work environment is less stressful. There exists a feeling of openness and confidence and a greater ability for people to believe they can take risks.

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Blog Trust Me

The Essentials of Integrity

by Ron Potter October 29, 2018

Integrity and the trust it births are a leader’s treasured assets to be guarded at all costs. It is difficult to build an organization—or a life—successfully without integrity.

With integrity, you’re the real deal.

Last week, we discussed stumbling blocks to a life of integrity. This week I want to talk about some of the essentials of that kind of life.

Develop trust

People are most willing to follow someone they can trust. The current lack of trust in business leadership seems to have resulted from a corporate culture in which leaders have shown a complete disregard for personal integrity.

Building trust with employees, peers, and investors starts and ends with integrity.

If there is a lack of consistency between our public and private lives, then eventually we will be unable to manage the divide. Integrity will crumble.

Act boldly

Bold acts issue from a person who has unshakable confidence. It is important to know the values and principles that drive your behavior.

It is important to know the values and principles that drive your behavior. Only then will you have the confidence to act boldly in spite of peer pressure or prevailing opinions.

Leaders who want a total quality life seek to act boldly when faced with compromising decisions and actions. They have no fear because they fall back on their values and their deep need to live a life of integrity and trust.

Exhibit a great attitude

The pursuit of integrity requires what is best and noble in your character.

Approach all you do with a joyful, positive, uplifting mind-set. The pursuit of integrity requires what is best and noble in your character. You can’t afford the defeating, polluting influence of a negative outlook.

Sincere, genuine, authentic, trustworthy. Are these words that are often heard when people describe you? Or how about guarded, pretentious, closed, lacking character? Leadership is all about influence. Without integrity and the trust it builds, you lose all ability to influence others.

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Blog Trust Me

Integrity Stumbling Blocks

by Ron Potter October 22, 2018

William Pollard wrote in The Soul of the Firm,

As we seek to understand and apply a cause for our work, our desire is not to be known for what we know but for what we do. We must be people of integrity seeking to do that which is right even when no one is looking and staying committed whether the test is adversity or prosperity.

Becoming a leader is more easily contemplated than accomplished. Before we explore the attitudes and actions that build a life of integrity, we need to look at several stumbling blocks that are not always easily seen or surmounted on the journey.

Fear

When we are paralyzed by fear, we tend to lose perspective and often make decisions or act in ways that do not support our integrity. Fear-caused paralysis then leads to procrastination.

Fear does tend to immobilize. Our lack of action sends a powerful—if unintended—message: Our actions (or resulting inactions) do not match our intentions.

Procrastination leads to purposelessness. We find ourselves losing our vision and hope. We vacillate and lose heart. We are paralyzed, we procrastinate, and then we simply give up. Integrity and living a life of quality sink below our radar. We expect—or others expect us—to deliver results, but we are bound by such fear that we lose our sense of direction and, along the way, our core strength.

Compromise

Compromising values happens gradually over time—one little lie or indiscretion adds to another until, almost imperceptibly, integrity and character erode. Finally, at some point our integrity is overwhelmed.

A friend once said, “Sin always takes you farther than you intend to go and keeps you longer than you intend to stay.” Compromising our integrity leads to a similar situation.

Many of the business tragedies started as minor omissions or small wrong decisions. Over time they grew, and suddenly the CEOs found themselves telling lies to their stockholders, employees, and the media. Records were fudged; fortunes have been lost. And it all started with one small compromise.

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy, like fear and compromise, can destroy integrity and render leaders trustless.

The word hupokrisis was used in classical Greek as part of theatrical acting. It came to mean acting a part. In this sense the greatest actors are true hypocrites: They assume a role and act out a part. Their acting roles are separate from their real lives. But in leadership, integrity is about actions matching beliefs. Do leaders “act” the part or are they genuine? Does their walk match their talk?

Fear, compromise, and hypocrisy are daunting barriers to a life of integrity. But living the alternative—a whole life of integrity—is definitely possible and well worth the effort.

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Favored Are Those with Unshakable Ethics

by Ron Potter October 15, 2018

In their book Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It, James Kouzes and Barry Posner surveyed thousands of people across this country and around the world. In the process they completed over four hundred written case studies. As they identified characteristics most people desire in a leader, honesty or ethics was identified more frequently than any other trait.

That seems to make perfect sense. People are most willing to follow someone they can trust. They want to know that leaders will be straight with them, will be consistent, will follow through on what they say, and will be true to a set of values. They want leaders with unshakable ethics.

So what has happened to us? As we write this book, corporate America is hurting. Never before have so many executives been under investigation, and never before have so many not been trusted. USA Today reports,

More than seven in 10 Americans say they distrust CEOs of large corporations. Nearly eight in 10 believe that top executives of large companies will take “improper actions” to help themselves at the expense of their companies. In the past nine months, the percentage of Americans who say they see Big Business as an actual threat to the nation’s future has nearly doubled, to 38%.

This lack of trust seems to have resulted from a corporate culture in which leaders have shown a complete disregard for personal ethics.

BusinessWeek Online reported that on February 7, 1999, the audit committee of Enron Corporation’s board of directors heard the company auditors describe Enron’s accounting practices as “high risk.” In response, none of the directors objected to the procedures, requested a second opinion, or demanded more prudent measures. Further, a Senate subcommittee investigation found that similar reports by Arthur Andersen personnel occurred once or twice each year from 1999 through 2001 with the same result: Not one director drilled deep enough into the details or objected to the high-risk practices.

Building trust with employees, peers, and investors starts and ends with integrity. Consciously or subconsciously, all leaders decide what values to adopt. Either they choose truth, honesty, and fairness or they choose “cooking the books,” “image managing,” and winning at all costs.

If integrity is so important to people, why don’t our leaders seek to live it? Is it a quality you seek in your own life? If people do not believe your words or if they doubt the credibility of your actions, how will you accomplish anything of value? Who will take you seriously?

Jesus said that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Integrity represents a great treasure. Seek it with all your heart.

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Blog Leadership

Believability: Do you have it?

by Ron Potter July 12, 2018

Believability

One of the books I’ve read recently is Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio.

Ray shares many of the characteristics that have helped him build companies through the years. One of the characteristics he talks about believability. While he asserts everyone has a say and it should be respected, some people tend to be more believable than others. Within Ray’s organization, people have a believability rating. The rating is based on things such as:

Are they an expert in the field?
Do they know what they’re talking about?
What’s their track record been like?

Measuring Believability?

When I began to think about this word, believability, I had some difficulty thinking about the teams I work figuring out the criteria that I would use to determine their believability. As I tried to think about how to measure believability I began thinking about a very old principle, one I talk about in my book, Trust Me, that seemed to be interchangeable with this idea of believability. That principle is integrity.

Integrity

People seem to innately know whether you have integrity or not. You need integrity to lead people. Without integrity, you have very little ability to influence people.

If I believe you are a person of high integrity, then I’m willing to be influenced by what you say, believe and share with me. However, if I believe you happen to be a person of low integrity, I have absolutely no interest in being influenced by you. Leadership is only influence. If you lose your integrity, you lose your ability to influence. Therefore, you lose your ability to lead.

Maybe this is the principle that Ray is getting at when he talks about believability. Does it correlate with integrity? I think so. We’ve been influenced by people who are non-experts in a field simply because they are people of high integrity. So, pay attention to your integrity. Don’t lose that.

Measuring Integrity

One of the simplest definitions I’ve seen for the word and concept of integrity is: “Are you always the same person regardless of circumstances.”

Are you the same person talking to your boss as you are talking to a server in a restaurant?
Do you treat your employees just as you expect to be treated by your boss?
Are you the same person at work as you are on the golf course?

If you sustain your integrity, you sustain your believability, and you increase your ability to influence and lead.

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Blog Culture

The Hidden Dangers of Projectors

by Ron Potter December 22, 2016

I love movies. And based on annual ticket sales in movie theaters of about ten billion dollars it appears I’m not alone.

I like big screen movies. I like small short movies. Live action, animated, professionally produced, little family vignettes created from my phone. Even non-moving images like the old slides on our shelf that require the carousel slide projector (my apologies to those of you born since the 80’s. You may have to ask an older person about carousel projectors).

But, to be enjoyed, they all need projectors. Even if that projector is the screen on my smartphone, the digital file is not very enjoyable until it is projected. Projectors have a unique property, they can only project an image is has already been produced by someone. Maybe it was the camera on my phone. Maybe it was the old Kodachrome film in my camera. Maybe it was a professional production with big name producers, directors and actors. Everything that gets projected is an image that someone created or imagined.

And therein lies the dangers of projectors.

When you project intent on another person, you’re only projecting images that you’ve created in your own mind. It really has nothing to do with their intention or belief system, it has all to do with what you believe their intention to be.

When someone attributes behavior to certain reasons:

They said that because they always lie.
They really don’t like that person.
They never take accountability for their own behavior.

my assumptions are those attributes are projections. It reflects how they would behave in that situation, not necessary why the other person is behaving that way.

Be careful how you may be projecting your beliefs and intentions on other people. Someone may see it as the projection of the movie playing in your own head.

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Blog Leadership

Being Wrong or Sorry: Which is most dangerous?

by Ron Potter December 8, 2016

One of my clients recently made the statement that it was harder to say “I’m wrong” than it was to say “I’m sorry.” Therefore, he was always quick to admit when he was wrong (Thanks Simon). Isn’t that interesting? He had learned that it was easier to take the hard route than it was to take the easy route.

I didn’t have much time to think about that statement the rest of that day but then I had a long plane ride home and that thought kept bouncing around in my head. I knew there was more to that simple statement than what was being said on the surface but I learned a long time ago that if there was something nagging at my brain, my best approach was to alternate between consciously thinking about it and then let it settle into the subconscious while I distracted myself with other thoughts, reading or quiet time. Being on an airplane (sometimes) offers the perfect environment for that process.

Soon a very old book began to emerge in my thoughts. The Road Less Traveled written in 1978 by M. Scott Peck. The opening sentence of that book is three simple words: “Life is Difficult.” Think about all the complaining, whining, protesting, etc. that you hear today and if you look behind those actions you’ll find a belief that life is supposed to be easy. It isn’t. Life is difficult.

What I remember about that book is that after that opening sentence, Dr. Peck, a psychiatrist, spends the rest of the book describing how the avoidance of pain and suffering leads to mental illness. I have seen this principle played out in corporate leadership teams over many years. Leaders and teams who subtly but consistently avoid the pain and suffering associated with hard decisions began to create an environment and culture that could easily be labeled as mentally ill. These leaders and teams begin avoiding almost all decisions because they’ve built up the habit of not dealing with the difficult decisions. Life is difficult. Don’t assume that if you make all of the right decisions, personal and professional, that you’ll cruise through life and just won’t have to deal with the hard stuff.

As my client says, he always takes the hard route of admitting he was wrong. It actually makes the difficulties of life, leading and teaming easier to deal with.

Remember, it’s harder to say you’re wrong than say you’re sorry. Do the hard thing. It’s always easier in the long run.

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Blog Trust Me

The Maturity to Persevere

by Ron Potter November 7, 2016

A quote from the Bible says, “Whenever trouble comes your way, let it be an opportunity for joy. For when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be strong in character and ready for anything.”
When leaders develop endurance or perseverance, they also develop maturity—not only within themselves but also within their organizations and teams. Perseverance breeds character as we stick to the task, bring others along with us, and develop an enduring organization. According to Julien Phillips and Allan Kennedy,

Success in instilling values appears to have had little to do with charismatic personality. Rather it derives from obvious, sincere, sustained personal commitment to the values the leaders sought to implant, coupled with extraordinary persistence in reinforcing those values.

Persevering leaders understand the importance of bringing every part of the organization along with them. It is a time-consuming and focused activity that will eventually yield tremendous results in overall morale, productivity, and team/employee support.
A leader needs to understand that he or she may quite naturally have an easy time focusing on the future or on how the future will look when certain projects, tasks, or goals are completed. Others within their teams may not be able to clearly or easily see the future, or they may be naturally pessimistic about anything involving the future. A leader needs the persistence to bring these people along—they are valuable to the team’s overall balance. They may simply need the leader to either ask them questions to propel them into the future or help them visualize steps to the future outcome.
Bringing an organization along also involves being particularly effective during times of change. Many on the team will naturally resist change, so leaders need to humbly and calmly coax people along to the new direction or vision.

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Blog Trust Me

The Integrity of Quality

by Ron Potter May 30, 2016

Many believe that quality and productivity will define the economics of the twenty-first century. One of the principal events of the last century was Japan’s postwar emergence as an economic superpower. This came about primarily because of the quality revolution among Japanese manufacturers of automobiles and electronics, who zoomed past their American counterparts as consumers demonstrated with their wallets a preference for imports and the quality (perceived or real) of the products brought to the marketplace. In the process, American companies exported millions of jobs and, at the same time, were jolted into the reality that American consumers wanted, and even demanded, the highest quality.

To stop the outflow of consumer dollars, American manufacturers instituted many programs to improve quality. Total Quality Management (TQM) became more than just a popular catch phrase. It became a process driver for hundreds of companies and the focus of many leaders.

Authors Tom Peters and Nancy Austin wrote: “Any device to maintain quality can be of value. But all devices are valuable only if managers—at all levels—are living the quality message, paying attention to quality, spending time on it as evidenced by their calendars.”

The spotlight on quality remains. Today, consumers expect every product and service to be of the highest quality. Joseph Juran, publisher of the classic Quality Control Handbook, states, “We’ve made dependence on the quality of our technology a part of life.”

Clearly, American leaders need to emphasize quality in every aspect of their organizations. Whether they are service-driven or product-driven, company leaders must completely understand the need for quality and communicate that message down the line so that everyone in the organization fully understands the importance of maintaining and improving quality.

This addresses organizational quality, but what about personal TQM?

In the wake of the Volkswagen scandal as well as other corporate meltdowns, investors have lost hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people are out of work. Cooked books, deceitful executives, and lackadaisical board members have caused a collapse of inconceivable proportions. The disintegration of these companies represents an unimaginable failure of leadership and governance. What has happened to personal quality?

As you learn and apply the principles of trustworthy leadership presented in my book, Trust Me, you will become a leader known for personal “total quality.” Specifically, no leader can have a life of quality without integrity. And the same is true for the entire organization. Without integrity, it will be impossible for the organization to have a truly high-quality reputation with customers, employees, peers, and shareholders.

Integrity is absolutely necessary for the success of a leader and an organization. A total quality life insists on integrity.

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Blog Culture Organizational Integrity Trust Me

Organizational Integrity

by Ron Potter May 16, 2016

How can you build a team integrity? By modeling some key qualities.

Vulnerability

A leader who is approachable, available, and open to other ideas, thoughts, and even criticism has learned to be a humble person and further develops his or her integrity.
Executives often overlook the power of vulnerability. They confuse vulnerability with being weak. Too often, and for whatever reason (fear, circumstances, office politics, and so on), leaders build walls around themselves. They add one brick at a time until one day they become walled off from their people and their peers. The walls give them protection, but at the same time, the walls hide them from the harsh realities that confront every leader and keep them from communicating effectively. They are insulated and protected, but they are also cut off from others. Behind the walls, they can control and be hidden from failure. Behind the walls, they do not need to trust others or be vulnerable.
Gates, instead of walls, give others access to leaders, which enables leaders to demonstrate that they are trustworthy, open, and humble. Gates also allow leaders to share their visions and values with others. Open gates allow leaders to be vulnerable, to let go, and to trust others, which in turn builds others’ trust in their leaders.
Once a leader takes this step of vulnerability, others will give back, and an effective team can be built on interpersonal integrity.

Self-Disclosure

Leaders need to be the first to share what they stand for, what they value, what they want, what they hope for, and what they are willing to do in order to get where they want to go.
Self-disclosing leaders also need to be willing to risk trusting and being open with others if they want people’s trust and openness in return. The only way to receive others’ trust is to first trust others yourself.
Self-disclosure is risky for a leader. However, most people will appreciate the openness and will buy into a leader’s plans, vision, dreams, and actions more easily than if a leader is walled off.

Prioritizing People-Development

Daniel Pink in his book “Drive” helps us understand that the three main driving forces of motivation are Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. People have a strong need to direct their own lives, a great desire to get better and better at something and a yearning to accomplish things in service of something larger then themselves. Giving people a purpose and then helping them grow and develop so that they become capable of doing great things on their own and with others adds to the integrity, wholeness of a team.

Learning to Change

Another way a leader builds team integrity is through a willingness to make changes. How does a leader do that? How does a leader react when challenged or confronted by peers or subordinates?
Tom Peters is no stranger to change. He insists that embracing change is the single most competitive weapon in business. He suggests the following major points to help leaders effect change:

Trust/respect/don’t underestimate potential.
Insist upon (and promote) lifelong learning.
Share information.
Get customers involved.
Emphasize ‘small wins.’
Tolerate failure to the point of cheerleading.
Reject ‘turf’ distinctions.”

Trusting Others

When leaders work to create high-trust cultures within their organizations and to ensure a sense of security, people feel that they can trust one another.

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Blog Trust Me

A Life of Integrity

by Ron Potter April 18, 2016

Before Peter Parker—the superhero Spider-Man—went public with his newfound superpowers, he had a heart-to-heart conversation with his Uncle Ben. Sitting in the car, Uncle Ben admonished, “These are the years when a man becomes the man he’s going to be for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into. You’re feeling this great power, and with great power comes great responsibility.”

Although these are fictional characters, Uncle Ben’s advice was sound: Be careful what you become.

Stephen Covey’s insights on staying consistent to a vision are well known but deserve repetition. He writes:

[To] “begin with the end in mind” is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined.… By keeping that end clearly in mind, you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day does not violate criteria you have defined as supremely important, and that each day of your life contributes in a meaningful way to the vision you have of your life as a whole.

Peter Drucker describes the “mirror test” in which leaders make sure that the person they see in the mirror in the morning is the kind of person they want to be, the kind of person they can respect and believe in. If there is a lack of consistency between our public and private lives, then eventually we will be unable to manage the divide. Integrity will crumble. We read of far too many leaders who have fallen as the truth about their private lives has emerged.

Living a “whole” life means doing things in a way that is consistent with our values and vision. It means standing firm on tough issues and making difficult choices. In a word, it means integrity. Here are three ways to reach that goal.

Act boldly

Bold acts issue from a person who has unshakable confidence. That confidence comes from knowing the principles that guide your life and knowing that these principles will lead to integrity.

It is important to know the values and principles that drive your behavior. Only then will you have the confidence to act boldly in spite of peer pressure or prevailing opinions.

Exhibit a great attitude

Another path to integrity as a “whole” existence is to approach all you do with a joyful, positive, uplifting mind-set. The pursuit of integrity requires what is best and noble in your character. You can’t afford the defeating, polluting influence of a negative outlook.

Performance specialist Dr. Bob Rotella writes about golf, yet his insights translate to leadership as well: “Standing on the tee and thinking about your drive going to the target doesn’t guarantee that it will go there. It only enhances the chances. [By contrast] Negative thinking is almost 100 percent effective.”

To succeed in business or any other challenge, we must maintain a great attitude. No matter what the obstacle or opposition, successful leaders believe they can overcome and win the battle. Their mind-set influences their performance, and there is no substitute for a positive outlook.

Understandably, it is hard to have a positive perspective when we are weighed down by doubts about our own character. When we’re one person in the mirror and another person to our employees, we’re divided and out of sync. When we—or others—question our integrity, it’s difficult to not allow doubt to overshadow our attitude and performance.

Develop trust

Integrity and trust are interwoven like two strands in a tightly wound cord. It’s really impossible to have one quality without the other. How do you become a person others trust?

In the organizational setting in particular, trustworthiness is based on both character—what you are—and competence—how well you do what you do. It is quite possible to have one quality and not the other. If you have confidence in my character but consider me woefully incompetent at my job, you may like me but not trust me.

Trustworthy people are dependable and consistent; their actions and lifestyles set an example of integrity and competence.

Building trust takes time. We can trust others and gain their trust when certain qualities are present, but we also need to remember that years of baggage associated with our personal lives, our leadership style, and how we do things can get in the way. Therefore, patience and understanding become necessary allies as we sort through our lives and seek to trust others.

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The Real Deal: The Barriers to Integrity

by Ron Potter April 4, 2016

The root word for integrity is integer—a whole or complete number. Leaders who focus on integrity chose to live a “whole” life.

Of course, they won’t do it perfectly, but in spite of normal and expected human frailties, a principled leader strives to be whole, undivided. He or she is “the real deal.”

William Pollard wrote in The Soul of the Firm,

As we seek to understand and apply a cause for our work, our desire is not to be known for what we know but for what we do and who we are. We must be people of integrity seeking to do that which is right even when no one is looking and staying committed whether the test is adversity or prosperity.

Yes, that’s exactly it. Integrity.

Fear

Anyone called into the principal’s office in elementary school understands the fear associated with integrity. Do I tell the truth? Do I keep my friends out of trouble? What will happen to us if I tell the principal exactly what we did?

If we do not combat fear, a downward spiral begins. Fearful thoughts lead to paralysis. President Harry S. Truman once said,

The worst danger we face is the danger of being paralyzed by doubts and fears. This danger is brought on by those who abandon faith and sneer at hope. It is brought on by those who spread cynicism and distrust and try to blind us to the great chance to do good for all mankind.

When we are paralyzed by fear, we tend to lose perspective and often make decisions or act in ways that do not support our integrity. Fear-caused paralysis then leads to procrastination.

Fear does tend to immobilize. Our people, the project, and the organization wait for us to act, and we cannot. When they observe our inaction, people begin to wonder what is so important about the assignment or initiative. Our lack of action sends a powerful—if unintended—message: Our actions (or resulting inactions) do not match our intentions.

Finally, as we hit bottom in this fear spiral, procrastination leads to purposelessness. We find ourselves losing our vision and hope. We vacillate and lose heart. We are paralyzed, we procrastinate, and then we simply give up. Integrity and living a life of quality sink below our radar. We expect—or others expect us—to deliver results, but we are bound by such fear that we lose our sense of direction and, along the way, our core strength.

Compromise

Most people don’t just plunge into compromising situations. It happens one step at a time.

Many of the business tragedies we are living through today started as minor omissions or small wrong decisions. Over time they grew, and suddenly the CEOs found themselves telling lies to their stockholders, employees, and the media. Records were fudged; fortunes have been lost. And it all started with one small compromise.

Hypocrisy

Sir Francis Bacon once wrote, “A bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint.” Hypocrisy, like fear and compromise, can destroy integrity and render leaders trustless.

In leadership, integrity is about actions matching beliefs. Do leaders “act” the part or are they genuine? Does their walk match their talk?

I once worked with a company where the CEO played many “parts.” In fact, he played so many parts that on many days the employees could not uncover who he really was. He was one person to the stockholders, another to his direct-reports, and a third person to employees (when he chose to speak to them). He would talk eloquently at company meetings about teamwork but work hard behind the scenes to create fear and tension between the divisions. He would promise profits to the shareholders but make wasteful decisions that eroded profits and cash flow. Eventually he left the company, but the wake of his hypocrisy nearly bankrupted the organization.

Fear, compromise, and hypocrisy are daunting barriers to a life of integrity. But living the alternative—a whole life of integrity—is definitely possible and well worth the effort.

One last thought:

If I don’t believe you have integrity, I’m not interested in being influenced by you. If we think about it we would probably all agree with that. Leadership is only influence! If you lose your integrity, you lose your ability to influence, you lose your ability to lead!

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