Integrity traps guide

I have recommended so many times the book Developing the leader within you, I can’t even remember. Each time I read the book over the years, I found myself contrasting each chapter with different experiences I had along my career, making the chapters acquire different meaning to me. In this post I’m sharing a practical view on the concept of integrity. For a nicer read of the subject, I highly recommend reading Chapter 3 of Maxwell book.

The word integrity immediately resembles concepts like ethic or morality. “Moral uprightness”. I like to think of it as something less abstract and very related to day to day experiences. Not only as a characteristic of a person, but as a characteristic of an act. You may consider yourself as a person with high work ethics, and still fall on many day to day “traps” that drive you away from acting with integrity.

My interpretation of integrity is close to the idea of algorithms. Given the same input, you would always expect the same output. It terms of integrity, the input is the context of a given situation, and the output are the decisions or ideas we communicate. If the context is clearly identified, we would always respond in the same way, acting with integrity. To exemplify the idea, here is a guide of “traps” I usually come across:

Trap: A manager or customer asking about a project progress / status / details we still don’t have much information about.

“Natural” response: We all want to be effective. It’s feels natural to answer back with our idea of a project progress instead of just sharing the facts. In our effort to sound effective, we may confirm things that are really assumptions. We show confident, so that people are not deceived. But chances are we will get more questions to get more details, eventually being forced to change our answer: we have fallen into the trap. A project deadline, our consideration if something is doable or not, our opinion on someone else’s performance are all possible traps.

Better answers to a situation we don’t have enough information about are: “I’m not sure”, “I have to confirm”, “I don’t know”, followed by the facts that we do know. There is no crime in saying we don’t know something. Further questions would probably be directed to getting more facts, instead of identifying if we have given the wrong answer initially. Our credibility has not been affected.

Trap: An employee asking for a raise, a week off, a bonus.

Now that’s a serious trap. As a manager it’s so tempting to say: “sure, we can talk about that later, but let’s finish the project first”. That’s it. You have fallen into the integrity trap. “Wait, but I didn’t confirm anything!”. It doesn’t matter. You have given expectations that something may happen really easy. You minimized and avoided the conversation, and it’s very possible that the employee is considering the ask as a given already. We have shown ourselves as the cool guy, instead of facing the (sometimes) bitter situation of giving right expectations. Unless you can really confirm what’s being requested at that point, always consider such questions as very delicate, and give proper and thoughtful advise. There is no turning back if you need to change your answer to “you know what…, they finally didn’t approve your week off”. Trying to share the blame because someone else didn’t approve something won’t make it up. And that’s the real trap: Lack of assertiveness may corner you to respond without integrity without even planning to do that.

It is said that people joins companies but quit to managers, and it’s probably because of traps like this.

Trap: Going after a job or project because it’s a good opportunity, even if it is not what you really want for your life.

This may only apply to those of us who are blessed with the opportunity to select the kind of work we want to do. Failing to identify what we really want to do, and following along what others expect from us, is probably the worst trap of all: the person deceived as a consequence of our lack on integrity may be ourselves (and ever our families). What are our real opportunities of success at doing something we don’t love? Having a clear understanding of what success really mean to us, is also a way to act and take career decisions with integrity.

Why traps?

I assume at some point, every job demands some type of tough conversations with coworkers, managers or employees. No-one likes delivering bad news, but avoiding or hiding them is never the right option. I like the practical way of thinking of traps, as a reminder that we cannot just “achieve” integrity in life. When faced with these traps, I literally say to myself: “Ok, here is another one… don’t mess up”.

Hope you enjoyed the reading. I would really like other people’s reflections on the subject, so please leave a comment!