Integrity - A Foundation of Great Leadership, A Great Personal Life and A Great Organisation.
“Integrity is a matter of a person’s word – nothing more and nothing less” - Michael Jensen
One of the most valuable lessons I ever learnt when it comes to integrity, is the what I came to believe about integrity - what I knew and was taught - was insufficient for the life I was committed to creating and living.
How did that happen?
Let’s look at the definition of integrity from the dictionary:
1. the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.
2. the quality or state of being unimpaired; perfect condition; soundness.
Can you see where I (and most people) screw up?
The definitions assume integrity has to do with (1) “morality” or (2) “perfection.
By definition morality is concerned with the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.
In this case, if we have integrity, we good and right. If we don’t have integrity, we are bad and wrong.
That’s not really empowering is it?
As for the second definition, “unimpaired and perfect condition”
That’s just great! I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly not perfect and I am also not unimpaired. I am a perfectly imperfect and impaired human.
So what now?
If integrity really is a necessary foundation in the game of performance and being a great leader, where does that leave us?
Quite frankly, it leaves me in constant state of disappointment.
To operate with integrity, we need a new view, a new interpretation and a new model of integrity - one that is consistent with who we are as a human being to be and act consistent with who we say we are and what we say we want.
Being A Person or an Organisation of Integrity:
In this new model, for a person or an organisation, integrity is a matter of a person (or organisation’s) word being whole and complete — nothing more, nothing less.
Here we use the phrase ‘whole and complete’ to represent the definition of integrity. Defined this way, integrity is a positive phenomenon, not a virtue.
There is nothing inherently good or bad, right or wrong about it - it is just the way it is.
In this definition integrity is the foundation of workability and trust that is required to create the maximum opportunity for performance.
According to the research, and paper, by the authors of this new model, the law of integrity states: As integrity declines, workability declines and as workability declines, value (or more generally, the opportunity for performance) declines.
Attempting to violate the law of integrity generates painful consequences just as surely as attempting to violate the law of gravity. Put simply (and somewhat overstated): “Without integrity nothing works.”
Think of this as a heuristic: If you or your organization operates in life as though this heuristic is true, performance will increase dramatically. And the impact on performance is huge: easily in the range of 100% to 500%.
Honouring Your Word vs Keeping Your Word.
While keeping your word is fundamentally important in life, you will not be able to always keep your word (unless you are playing a small game in life). However, you can always honor your word. Honoring your word is:
Keeping your word, OR
Whenever you will not be keeping your word, just as soon as you become aware that you will not be keeping your word (including not keeping your word on time) saying to everyone impacted:
That you acknowledge you will not be keeping your word, and
That you will keep that word in the future and by when, or that you won’t be keeping your word at all, and
doing what ever you need to deal with the impact on others of the failure of your not keeping your word (or keeping it on time).
The Bad News?
We can say with great confidence that no-one is a person or organisation completely in integrity. That self-satisfied view is one of the causes of the universal lack of integrity in the world.
The common belief that we have made it as people and organisations of integrity is one of the major factors contributing to the systemic worldwide lack of integrity.
The fact remains, integrity is a “mountain with no top,” so we had better get used to (and grow to like) climbing.
Even when people (and other human entities, such as banks, corporations, partnerships, and other organizations) have some general awareness of the damaging effects of out-of-integrity behaviour, for the most part they fail to notice their own out-of-integrity behaviours.
As a result, they end up attributing the damage from their out-of-integrity behaviour to other causes. They systematically believe that they are in integrity, or if by chance they are at the moment aware of being out of integrity, they believe that they will soon get back into integrity.
However, the combination of 1) generally not seeing our own out-of-integrity behaviour, 2) believing that we are a person of integrity 100% of the time, and 3) even when we get a glimpse of our own out-of-integrity behaviour, satisfying ourselves with the notion that we will soon restore ourselves to being a person of integrity keeps us from seeing that integrity is a mountain with no top.
To be a person of integrity requires that we recognise that integrity is a mountain with no top, and being joyfully engaged in the climb, leaves us as individuals with power, and leaves us known by others as authentic, and as men or women (a team or an organisation) of integrity.
While counterintuitive, owning up to any out-of-integrity behaviour and dealing with it with ‘honour’ leaves one showing up for others as a person of integrity.
Acknowledging that we will never ‘get there’ also opens us up a tolerance of (and an ability to see and deal productively and powerfully with) our own out-of-integrity behaviour as well as that of others.
What’s the cost of dealing with a person, team or organisation when there is a lack of integrity?
Consider the experience of dealing with an object that lacks integrity. Say a car or bicycle. When it is not whole and complete (e.g a component is missing or malfunctioning) it becomes unreliable, and unpredictable, and it creates those characteristics in our lives.
The car fails in traffic, we create a traffic jam, we are late for appointments, fail to perform, disappoint our partners, associates, the team … and so on
In effect, the out-of-integrity car creates a lack of integrity in our life with all sorts of unworkability fallout. This is true of all our associations with persons or entities that are out of integrity. The effects are huge, but generally attributed to something other than the lack of integrity.
The Good News?
Honouring one’s word is truly an amazing phenomenon, one that myself and my colleagues are eager for people to implement in their business, with their teams, in their own leadership and in their personal life.
Want to know more about how you can embed the simple practices of integrity in your business, leadership or life?
Book a call with me!
A conversation cost nothing, but may be worth an absolute fortune.
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Have a remarkable week and, as always, be well,
Kylee x
Reference: information presented in this article has been adopted from the past 20 years in my training together with excerpts from the article ‘Without Integrity Nothing Works’ by Michael Jensen.
Dr. Michael C. Jensen is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. He has played an important role in the academic discussion of the capital asset pricing model, stock options policy, and corporate governance. See Dr. Jensen’s full biography
Werner H. Erhard is recognized worldwide as a business, management, and humanitarian leader. He has consulted for numerous corporations and charitable and governmental agencies. See Werner Erhard’s full biography
You can view a PDF version of the full research paper here, from the Social Science Research Network.
