Is Your Integrity Showing?

I’ve been in my profession for almost 20 years and spent many more years observing successful and unsuccessful individuals and organizations.  After giving some thought to what the successful individuals and groups have in common, it became clear that we rise and fall on many qualities, but two are the most common:  integrity and communication.  I’ll write more about communication in another post but let’s focus on integrity today.  For the record, the definition of integrity I use is your values matching your actions, forming a unified ethical whole.  Most people associate integrity with honesty, but it goes further than that.

Integrity is like a good sense of humor or good driving skills:  Everyone thinks they have it.  Some would even argue – as did some recent college graduates I interviewed – that they always live in a state of integrity; they always live their values.  The truth is that no one has perfect, unfailing alignment between their values and actions.  We all occasionally – hopefully rarely -- do things that are out of step with what we believe we should do or be.  Some people, however, have more alignment than others, and organizations, like individuals, can “walk the walk” (or not), too.  This is important for ethical reasons, of course, but it also has pragmatic benefits as well:  That level of integrity is part of what determines success. 

The reason integrity is so important in terms of leadership and success is that it is one of the major factors in creating trust.  Without trust, you simply cannot have effective working relationships, whether it’s with supervisees, supervisors, colleagues, customers, constituents or any other group or individual you work with.  Can you work effectively with someone you can’t trust?  Probably not.  You can work with them, sure, but I’m guessing that you will be guarded, the interactions will take longer because of the need to verify and follow up, and you will almost always attempt to lessen or avoid contact with those untrustworthy individuals because working closely with them costs you too much emotionally and temporally.  Those relationships are the key to doing anything at all, whether it’s selling a car or teaching a student. Trust is the foundation of those relationships and integrity is the concrete that makes up that foundation.

So how do you know you have integrity?  Here are five ways to see if your professional integrity is showing.

What do you do to ensure trust and integrity?