(Photo: HO, AFP/Getty Images)

We recently experienced a 7.0 earthquake. The same size of the earthquake the leveled Haiti.

There has been lots of mess. But gratefully, and amazingly, no one was hurt.

Two days after the quake, I drove over a large bridge. I wasn’t thinking about the bridge until I saw engineers checking it out and noticed a couple of cracks.

I felt a little queasy.

But something in me trusted that if they had kept the bridge open it must be safe.

Integrity and trust

Imagine if every time you drove over a bridge you needed to get out and check it. To make sure you’ll survive the drive across.

Imagine if every safe driver needed to stop and check every bridge before they drove across.

It would make a mess out of things.

Society can’t operate without trust. To function, we need to able to trust other people. Other systems. Even people we’ve never met. Systems we may not be aware of.

Organizations can’t operate without trust either.

The is a direct correlation between levels of trust within an organization and its ability to grow, survive challenges, and meet opportunities.

How is trust built?

Integrity.

You might use other words: Honesty, credibility, trustworthiness, truthful.

Whenever I lead a group of leaders through a strategy conversation or a culture change process or even a leadership development initiative – they’ll normally all tell me that integrity is a core value.

When I work in a dysfunctional workplace. Where there is conflict between leaders. They’ll usually tell me that integrity has somehow been compromised.

Integrity is important.

When people don’t trust each other, processes or systems there are problems:

• There is a lack of buy-in.
• There may be resistance – passive or active.
• More effort is needed to establish guarantees and assurances.
• Action or progress is slowed or stopped.
• Partnerships, collaborations, and teams are weakened. Factions are formed.
• Communication is distorted and complicated.
• Blaming and accusations increase. In the absence of trust, anything we don’t understand tends to be attributed to malevolent intent.
• Energy and resources are diverted into creating security/hedging bets as opposed to creating progress.

None of the above contribute to a healthy, vibrant, effective or profitable workplace.

It is all a drain on the system. A burden. An erosion of value.

Integrity is obvious. Why discuss it?

Patrick Lencioni calls integrity a “permission-to-play” value. Meaning, he doesn’t feel you should be in the game if you, your team or organization doesn’t have integrity.

I completely agree with that statement.

But it doesn’t deal with the reality that integrity is neither well understood nor practiced. In fact, it isn’t “permission to play” at all.

I’d argue that integrity has become a differentiator.

Many leaders “play without permission.”

I’ve found that it is common for leaders to insist that others be honest, forthright and upfront.

But they make exceptions for themselves. It’s understandable (or necessary) that they distort or withhold information. It makes sense that they avoid dealing with issues.

Even when I call them out on this inconsistency– it is surprising how often it doesn’t seem to register.

Personally, I think they’ve so rationalized their behavior that they genuinely don’t see it.

That’s not a healthy state to be in.

Environments of distrust

When I was in college, it was fashionable to conduct research that “debunked” commonly held facts.

As a writer, I’m often encouraged to be “contrarian” and explain why others are wrong.

Distrust is viewed as virtuous. Being trusting is viewed as being naïve and immature.

We live in an environment where people are conditioned and taught that it is a sign of intellect and education to be skeptical and cynical.

We live in a low trust environment.

Trust must be earned

As a leader, in a low trust environment, integrity is a differentiator.

Building a culture and organization known for integrity not only allows you to operate far more effectively – but it sets you apart.

But since so many people (colleagues, staff, customers, vendors, etc.) start with distrust as their default position – it is critical that leaders and their organizations actively work to earn trust.

By practicing integrity.

The three components of integrity

For you or your organization to have integrity it needs to practice three things:

• Honesty: Being truthful, authentic and non-deceptive
• Consistent: Following through, being reliable, doing-what-you-say-you-will-do
• Alignment: Your actions follow your words. Actions, policies, and practices are in alignment with values and vision.

One of the primary errors that leaders make is they assume that by just following one of the attributes above they’ve acted with integrity.

• Honesty + Alignment without Consistency = Creates a sense of unreliability. People may think you are well-meaning, but they’ll never know if they can count on you to do what you said you would do.
• Consistency + Alignment without Honesty = Creates the belief that you are insincere or fraudulent. Causes people to believe you are insincere in your intent or motivations. It scares people because they know you have the discipline to follow through – but they also know you’ll be deceptive or self-serving when convenient.
• Honesty + Consistency without Alignment = Creates confusion. Your decisions and actions are based on your whims of the moment. You don’t align yourself with organizations values or goals. So people cannot predict or interpret your intent or desired.

You need all three. So does your organization:

• Tell the truth – Honesty.
• Do what you say you will do – Consistency.
• Act in agreements with stated values, vision, goals, and priorities, – Alignment.

What do you need to do?

As a leader, take an honest self-assessment:

• How often do you tend to distort, spin or hide the truth? How often do you encourage or allow this kind of behavior within your organization?
• Do you do what you say you will do? Do you practice accountability to commitments and agreed on behaviors? Do you allow others to hold you to account? (The test is: Do they do this?)
• Are your decisions and actions in alignment with stated values, priorities and so on? Or do you feel the rules and structures are for other people – not for yourself?

It is not easy moving from an organization that lacks integrity toward one that does. The same people on a team who may demand integrity from others may be the ones who struggle the most to recognize their own need for change.

But…the value

Integrity is worth it:

• To be able to have team meetings without second-guessing the intent of others.
• To not have to wonder if someone else will follow through.
• For accountability check-ins to feel like opportunities to celebrate accomplishments and get help with challenges.
• To gain traction with growth and move past issues.
• To hear laughter and see smiles in your workplace.
• To enjoy being together.
• To experience the trust of clients and customers.

The effort you put into building integrity in your leadership and within the organization will pay for itself in spades.

If you recognize an area for growth – don’t wait. Start creating that change today.

Take good care,

Christian

P.S. A huge THANK YOU to all the engineers and everyone who developed the building codes in Anchorage, Alaska! Your hard work and expertise are rarely tested. But when we needed it, it was there. Thanks for all that you do for us.

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