What does that word mean to you? For me it’s in part about the values we hold and our ability to live in alignment with them. It’s about our wholeness, our moral compass and our reliability. It is a vital foundation of leadership. It conveys an insight to who we really are as a person or an organisation.
Indeed, integrity is highly prized amongst leaders and teams alike but isn’t so easy to achieve. Context, stress, communication failures, competing priorities, pressure to perform, ego and many other factors can trip us up.
It demands a vigilance and an awareness second to none if we are to preserve it.
How do we recognise lack of integrity?
Some examples include, paying attention to the congruence between our words and actions. Or being tempted to betray the trust of another for our own gain – even in subtle or complex ways. Engaging in manipulation of a situation for our own benefit. These of course are all pretty obvious.
But lack of integrity can also be sensed when we deny our own potential, play small or choose not to address a situation clearly and honestly when needed.
The fundamental underpinnings of integrity start with our ability to be self-aware, honest with ourselves and monitor our congruence in words and actions. Engaging the support of third parties to act as mirrors to us is a very useful way of ‘seeing’ ourselves more clearly and confronting the sometimes-opaque choices that can emerge.
That someone might be a coach, a peer, a friend or partner. The key is to choose someone whom you trust and who will help you really look at yourself and the situation without colluding with you. A regular self-audit is also something to consider.
One cornerstone is ethics. Our values can change based on life experiences, but our ethics should remain constant because ethics describe a higher code of practice than our personal life experience. They are about the highest possible principles for collective human behaviour and provide the baseline for how we choose to live as a civilised society. Integrity invites us to consider the ethics that govern our behaviours.
Integrity, ethics and leadership are fundamentally intertwined. Perhaps a question facing all leaders at this time is the degree to which we are really spending time building cultures – in organisations and societies – where integrity and ethics are the cornerstone.
If we were to do the audit at that level, what would we find?