Working With Integrity – The Art of Being Your Word
By Daniel Robin
At work, “being your word” requires vigilant attention to your own boundaries, using all your interpersonal skills, and watching out for double binds. It also takes a decent amount of courage and a compassionate commitment to constant learning. So cut yourself some slack. Nobody, not even those with the utmost of integrity, can honor all their agreements all the time. That would require either perfect self-knowledge or living in a vacuum. Don’t set yourself up for that.
Of course, accepting your own human tendency to mess up on occasion does not mean becoming sloppy or complacent. Au contraire … especially if you’ve taken on a “big game,” it means paying careful attention, making sure your high-wire act adds “insight to injury,” using the grit in the moment to buy yourself more integrity for the next.
Discovering how you operate while stretching those comfort zones can be a pungent source of learning and improvement, but it is also a form of engaged leadership that sets the tone and inspires others to do their best work. And instead of focusing on other people’s integrity (or the lack thereof), take responsibility for fostering an environment where openness and honesty are naturally a part of doing business.
Being Your Word
Aside from not lying, cheating or stealing, a key to professional integrity is to “be your word.” This boils down to being impeccable with what you say and backing up the power of your words through your actions. Short version: a promise made is a promise kept. In practice, since I’ve yet to meet a soul who can do this 100% of the time, put your attention on strategies for consistently closing the gap between “say” and “do.”
Consistency is the basis for trust, from which your reputation follows. See Five Ways to Be Reliable, for tips on how to succeed at this. For example, Tip #1: Make fewer and better agreements.
The broader challenge is to close the gap between your core values – your true, lifelong priorities – and your daily habits. Some professionals create a “code of conduct” as a steady reminder of how they wish to run their lives. For example, if you value honesty, how are you expressing it? Could you make a plan to live it more fully?
Professional Superglue: My Word is My Bond
In practice, integrity means an unwavering commitment to honoring your internal and external commitments. A commitment would include what others would assume to be your responsibility because you didn’t set an expectation to the contrary.
The word “honor” may sound like the language of a marriage vow, as in “to love, honor and respect …”. In a way, being your word is like a vow, a covenant; perhaps not “until death,” but far stronger than letting your feelings in the moment guide how you treat your promises. Your mission, should you choose to accept it (take a deep breath): your word is your most solid bond.
Engaged Integrity
If you didn’t engage in living your life to the fullest, it would be relatively easy to just focus on what’s in front of you, letting circumstances dictate your ambition. “Walking the talk” is no big deal if you’ve built your worklife around safely avoiding letting others down, or if your career is on autopilot. (And be sure to attend the next scheduled meeting of “Underachiever’s Anonymous,” but don’t expect too much out of it.)
Certainly there’s virtue in being steady and consistent, so all I’m saying is that some leaders would benefit from boldly stepping “out of their box.” (Still, others may need to find their box and get back into it.)
Checkpoint: How Do You Operate?
Are you comfortable saying “no” even if you feel obligated? Do you whole-heartedly say “yes” even when there are big risks involved? If circumstances change, do you conscientiously renegotiate the agreement early enough to help find another way to get it done?
Even if you do everything you can to come from integrity, have you noticed how rare it is in our culture? Why is that? What happens?
People with the utmost of integrity are often tripped up or compromised by the downsides of speed, greed, and creed. Here are practical solutions for avoiding these hidden integrity traps, first by poking some holes in the myths that commonly justify their use. By steering clear of these obstacles, you earn (or maintain) a reputation as reliable and credible, worthy of respect and autonomy. Plus, people who demonstrate integrity act as powerful role models –cornerstones for the workplace and culture they represent – setting new standards for effective leadership.
Three Obstacles to Integrity
Speed, greed and creed present leadership challenges that can tempt or trap us, or merely throw us off track temporarily. Beware of the tendency to offer these same influences as the excuse for making poor choices or engaging in unscrupulous behavior in the first place. Here are some ideas on how to reverse these patterns:
Obstacle 1: SPEED – Western culture is addicted to going fast. Warp speed is considered essential to business success – particularly in certain professions and competitive industries. With expressions like “the fast eat the slow,” popular books and magazines like Fast Company say keep pace or don’t play.
But speed is not the same as haste (that waste-making thing), and there must be boundaries and limits set to ensure quality amidst ‘the rush’ rush. Although many of us are speed freaks, that doesn’t mean we have to be in a hurry. Giving in to the heat of making more decisions per hour can result in choices that are integrity sinks – fast, sure, but not necessarily wise, tending to backfire in the long-run.
As a leader, if you want speed, focus on workflows and process improvement; people have their own rhythm and there’s not a lot of value in hurrying it along.
There’s a “zone” of optimal performance that comes from the right amount of pressure: too much and non-productive stress occurs, too little and boredom, apathy or naps tend to occur. Pressure can be what keeps us on our toes. If we let pressure take over, we tend to get overly fixated on the task and forget about the importance of relationships.
If you find yourself in the “zone of overwhelm” most of the time, check out the article Communication Skills for People Under Pressure. We also offer a training module on the link between pressure and performance, and a course on Humor at Work that’s about making sure you save time to laugh at all of this.
If you feel pressured to perform in ways that feel like you could be compromising your integrity, what to do? Is that pressure self-induced or coming from an outside source? Get clear about what will produce your best work but be open to making process changes. When you understand and can make the most of your natural rhythm, you find “flow” and breeze through even the worst messes.
Assertively going “full steam ahead” is one thing, but take time to build rapport if you expect cooperation by others.
Obstacle 2: GREED – Economic prosperity is what we all want, but how much is enough, and how to achieve it without avarice? The desire for insatiable and excessive economic gain is perhaps the #1 threat to integrity. (Enron, anyone?) Fortunately, checks and balances help to define “enough,” but our systems of commerce and “single bottom line” scorekeeping blind us to what it all signifies. We don’t play just to get what we need; we are patterned to play for the sake of having – as much as we can get.
In capitalism, money’s the scoreboard by which we measure our success. But few would argue that economic gain is worth compromising health, environment, or relationships.
Manipulating systems for near-term gain – even at the risk of a severe downstream price – can be tempting and seductive. What would happen if the game shifted from striving to “get away with” as much as possible to instead delivering as much value as possible? Rewards would flow naturally, automatically, and integrity is preserved.
Obstacle 3: CREED – The third obstacle can manifest as a result of closely held fundamental beliefs or guiding principles. If you carry the belief “do unto others before they do unto you,” then that will largely determine how you operate. For example, did you know that the perpetrators of 9/11, just before the attacks, dutifully returned all the unspent money? This illustrates that you can otherwise act with “integrity” but still operate out of a creed that is as misguided as any we could imagine. All I’m saying is that these perpetrators are (or were) creed-bound, cold-blooded terrorists, not flakes.
If you simply assume that your employees are capable, loyal, and concerned about the success of the business, how would that change the challenge of operating with integrity?
Summary and Plan
Since our own culture gives us plenty of examples of what not to do, addressing these three obstacles can bring leaders closer to walking the proverbial talk. In the end, integrity may come from simply
1 Being professional and reliable (an art unto itself, especially when dealing with people who lack integrity, or seem to)
2 Managing expectations (shortcut: “under-promise, over-deliver”)
3 Noticing and acknowledging the root cause of breakdowns, but offering no blame nor making any excuses.
Consider this contract with yourself: What if you were to “Put out 100% of what’s wanted, 100% of the time, and be available to negotiate any differences.” In practice, this means be honest with yourself and others about what you really want, and have the guts to make it real. If, along the way, somebody or some thing pushes back, don’t give up or give in, don’t offer excuses, just deal with it and stay on track.
1. What areas of your life provide the greatest opportunities for closing an integrity gap? List then rank them.
2. What is one thing you could do in each area to begin the process? By when will you take that next step?
3. Optional, extra credit: you can use these questions to get feedback from other people who know you and how you operate (but don’t ask if you don’t really want to know the answers) …
a. “In your opinion, on a scale from 1 to 10, how much integrity do I demonstrate through my leadership?”
b. “What’s the one thing that I could do to demonstrate a greater degree of integrity on the job? How would that change my score?”
