Company Values: Managing Integrity from within.
In a corrupt world, acting with integrity will always stand out. It will always put you above the crowd — and dare I say — it will always make you more successful. Create a company culture of integrity and reap the benefits.
in·teg·ri·ty
/inˈteɡrədē/
noun
the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
When sitting down to write this post, I researched what integrity means to different people. Turns out, there’s so much grey area that it’s hard to define. But, if you can define it for your company, you’ll be far more successful as a business person, a manager, and a company.
If you Google corporate mottos, creeds, and mission statements, you’ll see a lot of:
- “We act with integrity in all we do.”
- “We combine integrity with excellence…”
- “We hold honesty and integrity as our guiding principles.”
Why are these declarations of uprightness and honesty needed? Integrity should be the cornerstone for doing business: Does anyone want to do business with a company that has a reputation for lying, cheating, and tricking its clients; or do employees want to work for a company that is morally bankrupt?
Integrity should be an expectation — not an exception. Why the need to tout its existence within your corporate culture? You shouldn’t be in business if you can’t act with integrity — right?
Well, after more research, it’s not that simple — for two reasons:
The ability of humans to rationalize their behavior based on certain circumstances. For example, if you ask students whether or not it’s okay to cheat, most will say that cheating is wrong. Yet research suggests that as many as 95% of those same students admit to having cheated. So where’s the discrepancy? Well, the situational rationalization. The students justify their personal choice as “not really cheating”, or “no big deal.” This way they can still consider themselves as honest.
The reality of life is that we all face decisions regarding integrity on a daily basis. Are we honest 100% of the time? Do we reveal everything to a prospective buyer during due diligence? Is it acceptable to hide certain aspects of the market from our competition? Do we inflate experience? Etc. As you can see, no matter what choice we make, we can convince ourselves that it was made with integrity — but was it?
This leads us to our second reason why integrity is so hard to enforce: Everyone defines integrity differently. Fudging information, hiding details, or outright withholding necessary information may be acceptable to one person, but completely unethical to another. This problem is further exacerbated by differences in company culture. Are those practices accepted company-wide, department-wide, or is it just a shady individual within the company? Is it one person in a leadership role? How do you manage that?
The power of rationalization and the difficulties of definition make integrity a hard word to pin down — and an especially hard aspect to manage. It’s a subject that’s neither easy nor simple. Solely relying on HR, company policies, rules, handbooks, and audits won’t work.
These instruments guard against gross and clearly illegal violations of integrity standards, but they do not deal with integrity choices we face daily. These choices require personal judgement, and because your company culture is relying on personal judgement, choose your people wisely.
Mission statements focused on integrity are important because they remind us that integrity is not just a corporate responsibility, but a personal one.
If you are in a managerial role, you can manage integrity by creating an environment in which you set aside some time with your team to share integrity dilemmas and walk through what your corporate standards and expectations are. If you hold these discussions regularly, you’ll gradually develop more common company-wide expectations.
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