Leadership Barometer 159 Integrity

August 24, 2022

Most of my writing is about trust and high integrity, but this article is about low integrity.  We know it exists because there are numerous examples in our daily life. They point to individuals doing something that they espouse as good but is really to advance their own purposes. 

Low integrity is common

It is easy to detect some pockets of low integrity in the public institutions and the government. What constitutes low integrity versus gamesmanship is subject to interpretation and debate.

In reality, we exist in a sea of low integrity. Gallup reports that 74% of employees worldwide believe corruption is widespread among businesses in their country.

This article helps us sort through what is a problem with integrity and what was well-intended but flawed behavior.  When we see flagrant violations of integrity, it is easy to determine that the person was duping the public.  In the extreme, some people just do what benefits them regardless of who it hurts.

The other extreme exists as well  

The other extreme is also easy to spot. In any community, you can find people who give amazing amounts of time and money to support causes. These people expect nothing in return.

The extremes are easy to identify. The majority of actions taken by people in routine business or personal decisions are somewhere between those extremes.

Where is the defining line? 

At some point, you cross the moral line between high integrity and low integrity. It is not my desire to judge anyone in this article.  I think each person has to decide on a case-by-case basis where the moral line exists. That decision reveals a lot about the ethical fiber of the person. It is not so simple to decide which activities are OK and which ones have crossed the line.

For some people, anything short of saintly behavior is wrong. Others will draw the line between good and bad just short of something being illegal.  

The heart of integrity is honesty

At its core, integrity is about honesty. To understand if an action is good or bad, we really need to dig deep into our psyche.  For example, maybe we really did take that action to help reduce homelessness. The improvement in our status was simply a by-product we obtained by networking with many new people.

Most low integrity is hidden

We only observe a tiny fraction of the deceit that goes on. Most of it goes undetected because we are simply unaware that the person had an ulterior motive.

An even deeper question is how would the person himself come to grips with his own true intentions. Where is the line of demarcation between doing something for others and helping one’s self?

We can go slowly insane trying to decipher motives. Nearly all of the time the true motivations are hidden from view. The “pay it forward” mindset is an approach to living that is highly appealing.

It is fun to help other people, even when you know there will be no direct payback. In fact, there is a payback, and it happens instantly. It is called satisfaction or self-esteem.

Conclusion 

We need to realize that there is always a return for every good deed. It does not spell incorrect behavior to do good things simply for the joy it brings.

Each individual draws the line between high integrity and low integrity. It is based on a personal level of morality. My hope is that more people will examine their true intentions rather than rationalize behaviors.

Bob Whipple, MBA, CPTD, is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and author in the areas of leadership and trust.  He is the author of: The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, and Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind.  Bob has many years as a senior executive with a Fortune 500 Company and with non-profit organizations

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Building Higher Trust 56 Integrity

January 28, 2022

Trust and integrity are inextricably linked.  I believe before you can trust other people, you must trust yourself.  That means you must not be fighting with yourself in any way, which is a pretty tall order.

Integrity is about what you do or think when nobody else in the world would know. It is an interesting topic because it is very difficult to determine your own personal level of integrity.

We Tend to Rationalize

We all justify ourselves internally for most of the things we do. We have it figured out that to take a pencil home from work is no big deal because we frequently do work from home.

We drive 5 mph over the speed limit because not doing so would cause a traffic hazard while everyone else is going 10 mph over the limit.

We taste a grape at the grocery store as a way to influence our buying decision.

When we are short-changed, we complain, but when the error is in the other direction, we pocket the cash.

We may lie about our age. We probably sneak cookies. If you have never done any of these things, let me know, and I will nominate you for sainthood. If you think hard enough, I am sure you can identify something you did that was ill-advised.

Lame Excuse

There are some times in life when we do something known by us to be illegal, immoral, or dumb. We do these things because they are available to us and we explain the sin with a lame excuse like “nobody’s perfect.” 

I guess that is true that all people (except newborns) have done something of which to be ashamed. What’s is the big deal? Since we all sin, why not relax and enjoy the ride? That rationale is disastrous because it destroys integrity. 

Crossing a Fine Line

The conundrum is where to draw a moral line in the sand.  Can we do something that is wrong and learn from that error so we do not repeat it in the future?  I think we can. I believe we have not only the ability but the mandate to continually upgrade our personal integrity. Here are seven ideas that can help the process:

  1. Reward yourself – When you are honest with yourself about something you did that was wrong, that is personal growth, and you should feel great about that.
  2. Intend to change – Once you have become conscious of how you rationalized yourself into doing something unethical, vow to change your behavior in that area and others.
  3. Reinforce others – Sometimes other people will let you know something you did, or are about to do, is not right. Thank these people sincerely, for they are giving you the potential for personal growth.
  4. Check In with yourself – Do a scan of your own behaviors and actions regularly to see how you are doing. Many people just go along day by day and do not take the time or effort to examine themselves.
  5. Recognize Rationalization – We all rationalize every day. By simply turning up the volume on your conscience, you can be more alert to the temptations before you. That thought pattern will allow more conscious choices in the future.
  6. Break habits – Many incorrect things come as a result of bad habits. Expose your own habits and ask if they are truly healthy for you.
  7. Help others – Without being sanctimonious, help other people see when they have an opportunity to grow in integrity. Do this without blame or condemnation; instead, do it with love and helpfulness.

Conclusion

We need to build our own internal trust so we can trust other people more. To do that, it is important to follow the seven ideas listed above. These ideas will allow you to move consciously in a direction of higher personal integrity.

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow, Inc. an organization dedicated to growing leaders. Website www.leadergrow.com   BLOG www.thetrustambassador.com He is author of the following books: The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals,  Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, and Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind

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Building Higher Trust 41 When No One Would Know

October 1, 2021

Integrity is crucial for building a culture of trust. Your ability to maintain and grow trust is impacted by how you act when nobody would know what you are doing. If you understand this dynamic, you have mastered a key component in the journey toward high trust that others have in you.

Have Personal Integrity

Integrity is as much an internal process as it is external. If you have a habit of always doing the right thing, then you don’t need to worry about whether or not other people can witness your actions.

Make it a habit to have the highest standard of ethics and follow up. Have a mental process that imagines every action as being witnessed by several other people. This mindset impacts how you view yourself.

Believe it or not, the most important person in your life is you, so having absolute internal integrity results in a kind of body language and congruency that enables others to trust you more.

People Do See You

People will observe and take note of all your actions over time. As you pass the “Trust Test” without fail, you build a positive balance of trust in your “Trust Bank.” Over time, the equity builds to a high level, and other people will forgive an occasional apparent lapse without loss of trust. They have complete faith in your integrity.

Nobody is perfect. There will be situations when what you intended to do comes out wrong. If the trust account with other people is high enough, a rare unintended slip up will not cause a loss in overall trust.

 Admitting Mistakes

Another good way to make deposits in the trust account is how you act when something went wrong or you made a mistake. Admitting a mistake is normally a trust-building event. The only times it is not is if the same mistake has been made in the past or the mistake reveals that you were not paying attention.

Summary

Having an attitude that you do the right thing whether other people are watching or not is about personal integrity.  You are responsible to yourself to do the right things.  Other people will observe this in you, and you will enhance the level of trust people have in you over time.

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow, Inc. an organization dedicated to growing leaders. Website www.leadergrow.com   BLOG www.thetrustambassador.com He is author of the following books: The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals,  Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, and Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind

 

 

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Building Higher Trust 3 Trust is More Complex Than We Realize

December 16, 2020

I start out every speaking engagement by asking my audience how they would define trust. It is an amazing exercise, because we all know what it is and experience it all the time, yet to define it precisely is a bit of a challenge.

Normally, the group is pretty quiet, then someone will say something like, “Trust is confidence.” Another person might offer, “Trust is integrity,” or “Trust is good follow up.” On and on it goes with adjectives that have a bearing on trust, but none of them come close to a robust definition.

More than just with people


I then share that nearly every one of the definitions offered had to do with trust between one person and another. In my previous article on Trust, I pointed out that trust is ubiquitous. It exists when we interface with any product or service. It is not just a phenomenon between people, it is a phenomenon between ourselves and every other thing we interface with.


Categories of Trust with People


Since the most familiar way we experience trust is in interpersonal relations, this article will amplify on that part of the general topic. Trust exists between people, but there are numerous different categories of trust in that realm. Trust is more like a mosaic; it has lots of parts and flavors.

For example, it I have confidence that you will do what you say, then that is one type of interpersonal trust. Trust is also a feeling that you will not hurt me in any way. It can also mean that you are looking out for my best interest. It might be that we share a common value of high trust in each other.

Basically, I believe interpersonal trust is a montage of concepts that weave together into a pattern that changes from moment to moment depending on what is going on at that time. Here is a link to a 3-minute video that expands on the concept of categories of interpersonal trust.

Bonus Video

Here is a link to a short video on this topic.



Bob Whipple, MBA, CPLP, is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and author in the areas of leadership and trust. He is the author of four books: 1.The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals (2003), 2. Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online (2006), 3. Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind (2009), and 4. Trust in Transition: Navigating Organizational Change (2014). In addition, he has authored over 1000 articles and videos on various topics in leadership and trust. Bob has many years as a senior executive with a Fortune 500 Company and with non-profit organizations


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Leadership Barometer 71 Demonstrate Integrity

November 11, 2020

There are hundreds of assessments for leaders. The content and quality of these assessments vary greatly. You can spend a lot of time and money taking surveys to tell you the quality of your leadership.

There are a few leading indicators that can be used to give a pretty good picture of the overall quality of your leadership. These are not good for diagnosing problems or specifying corrective action, but they can tell you where you stand quickly. Here is one of my favorite measures.

Demonstrate Integrity

Lou Holtz, the famous football coach had a remarkably simple philosophy of doing business. It consisted of three simple little rules: 1) Do Right, 2) Do the best you can, and 3) Treat other people like you would like to be treated.

The basic Do Right Rule means acting with integrity. If doing what is right is such a basic and easy thing, why am I even bothering to write about it?

It’s simple; most leaders have a hard time figuring out what the right thing is. That is a stunning indictment to make, but I really believe it is true on occasion. Reason: in the melee of everyday challenges, it is so easy to make a judgment that seems right under the circumstances, but when extrapolated to its logical conclusion it is really not ethical, or moral, or it is just plain dumb.

Rationalization

For a leader, it is easy to rationalize the particular situation and convince yourself that something marginal is really OK to do “all things considered.” There must be a safeguard for this common problem. There is, and I will reveal it later in this article.

The Problem Escalation

I believe that most of the huge organizational scandals of the past started out as subtle value judgments by leaders in their organizations. There was a decision point where they could have taken path A or path B. While path B was “squeaky clean” in terms of the ethics involved, path A was also perfectly logical and acceptable based on the rules in place at the time and was also somewhat more profitable than Path B.

The problem is that if path A was acceptable today, then A+ would be fine the next day, and A++ the next. Other people would get involved, and the practice would get more embedded into the culture.

Eventually, after a few years, it was clear that rules were being bent all over the place in order for the organization to look good to investors. There was no convenient way to roll back the ethical clock, nor was there any impetus. They seemed to be “getting away with it.”

Ultimately the practice, whether it was Enron’s disappearing assets or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme, became too big to hide and things blew up.

My contention is that these people were not intending to do bad things originally, they just got caught up in what Alan Greenspan called irrational exuberance and had no way to quit the abuse. Of course, by that time they really were evil people doing evil things, but I believe it did not start out with those intentions.

At the start I believe these leaders were truly blind to the origin of corruption that brought down their empires and bankrupt thousands of individuals in the process.

The Antidote

How can leaders protect themselves from getting caught up in a web of deception if they were originally blind to the problem? It’s simple; they needed to create a culture of transparency and trust whereby being whistle blower was considered good because it protected the organization from going down the wrong path.

Imagine if the culture in an organization was such that when someone (anyone) in the company was concerned about the ethics of current practice and he or she brought that concern to light, there would have been a reward rather than punishment.

To accomplish this, leaders need to reinforce candor, in every phase of operations. It has to be a recognized policy that seeing something amiss brings with it an obligation to speak up, but that is OK because speaking up will bring rewards.

When leaders at all levels reward the whistle blower, it sets up a culture of high trust because it drives out fear. One of my favorite quotes is, “The absence of fear is the incubator of trust.”

The concept or rewarding candor creates opportunities for leaders to see things that would otherwise be hidden and take corrective action before the tsunami gets started.

It also allows leaders to be fallible human beings and make mistakes without having them become a reason for them to spend the rest of their life in jail.

So here is a good test of your leadership ability. How transparent is your organization? Do you truly reward employees when they bring up things that do not seem right to them, or are they put down and punished?


Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations.

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Leadership Barometer 68 Firm but Fair

October 18, 2020

There are hundreds of assessments for leaders. The content and quality of these assessments vary greatly. You can spend a lot of time and money taking surveys to tell you the quality of your leadership. There are a few leading indicators that can be used to give a pretty good picture of the overall quality of your leadership. These are not good for diagnosing problems or specifying corrective action, but they can tell you where you stand quickly. Here is one of my favorite measures.

Firm but Fair

The book “Triple Crown Leadership” was coauthored by my friends Bob Vanourek and his son, Gregg. In the book, they stress that great leaders have the ability to flex between “steel” and “velvet.”

They are firm and unyielding on matters of principle or values, but they also display a softer more human side when dealing with some people issues.

Great leaders have this ability to flex, and they also know when to do it. If an issue has to do with certain characteristics (like integrity, safety, ethics, honesty) it is a mistake to bend the rules, even just a little. But, if the issue has to do with showing people you care and want to be fair to people, then on those issues you can flex to show you value these things too.

It is a mistake to take a hard line on every decision and always go “by the book.” Some leaders feel it is essential to maintain control by having a firm hand on the tiller. They often lose the respect of people because they show no human side.

It is also a mistake to be too soft and basically ignore important principles or rules. This posture will also cause a loss of respect.

To get the right balance, great leaders let people know they will be steel on some things and velvet on other things. This causes higher respect and also leads to higher trust within the organization.

One important caution on this philosophy is that you need to establish a predictable pattern for when to flex. If you do something for one person and not another, then you will be tagged as playing favorites, which always lowers trust. If it is unclear to people why you are being hard on one issue and soft on another, then you are going to confuse people, which also lowers trust.

I always found it helpful to explain to people why I am taking a hard line on some visible issue. For example, I might say, “We cannot allow this slitter to run with this safety interlock compromised. Even though we really need the production right now, we will never jeopardize the safety of our workers.”

Once you have established a track record for making the right choices, it is not as important to explain your rationale for each one. The way to tell is to watch the body language of people. If they look confused when you make a decision, then always explain your rationale.

If there is ever any push back on a hard or soft decision, listen to the input carefully before proceeding. Keep in mind that your perspective is not the entire story. There may be other worthy opinions.

Show by your consistent actions over time that you stand for certain things, but always be willing to listen to and consider contrary opinions. Then when you make a final decision, let people know why you went that direction. If you do that, you will grow trust consistently.


Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations.

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Leadership Barometer 11 Demonstrate Integrity

August 5, 2019

One great measure of the quality of a leader is how much that person demonstrates integrity.

That is an easy thing to say, but it is a bit harder to accomplish. Let’s pick apart the concept of integrity and see if we can find some usable handles.

First of all, integrity is easy to demonstrate when things are going well or according to plan.  It is a simple matter of doing the right thing, and the right thing is obvious.

Integrity is most important when it is difficult to do or the right path is hard to define.  It is in these moments when leaders have the ability to stand tall and radiate their integrity or duck the issue and do what seems expedient at the moment.

I call these times “Leadership moments of truth.”

Demonstrate Integrity

Lou Holtz, the famous football coach had a remarkably simple philosophy of doing business. It consisted of three simple little rules: 1) Do Right, 2) Do the best you can, and 3) Treat others the way you would like to be treated.

The basic Do Right Rule means acting with integrity. If doing what is right is such a basic and easy thing, why am I even bothering to write about it? It’s simple.

Most leaders have a hard time figuring out what the right thing is. That is a stunning indictment to make, but I really believe it is true.

Reason: in the melee of everyday challenges, it is so easy to make a judgment that seems right under the circumstances, but when extrapolated to its logical conclusion it is really not ethical, or moral, or it is just plain dumb.

Leaders tend to rationalize.

I believe that most of the huge organizational scandals of the past started out as subtle value judgments by leaders in their organizations. There was a decision point where they could have taken path A or path B.

While path B was “squeaky clean” in terms of the ethics involved, path A was also perfectly logical and acceptable based on the rules in place at the time and was also somewhat more profitable than Path B.

The problem is that if path A was acceptable today, then A+ would be fine the next day, and A++ the next. Other people would get involved, and the practice would get more embedded into the culture.

Eventually, after a few years, it was clear that rules were being bent all over the place in order for the organization to look good to investors. There was no convenient way to roll back the ethical clock, nor was there any impetus.

Ultimately the practice, whether it was Enron’s disappearing assets or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme, became too big to hide and things blew up. My contention is that these people were not intending to do bad things originally, they just got caught up in what Alan Greenspan called irrational exuberance and had no way to quit the abuse.

Of course, by the time things surfaced, they really were evil people doing evil things, but I believe it did not start out with those intentions. At the start I believe these leaders were truly blind to the origin of corruption that brought down their empires and bankrupt thousands of individuals in the process.

How can leaders protect themselves from getting caught up in a web of deception if they were originally blind to the problem? It’s simple, they needed to create a culture of transparency and trust whereby being a whistle blower was considered good.

Imagine if the culture in an organization was such that when someone (anyone) in the company was concerned about the ethics of current practice and he or she brought that concern to light, there would have been a reward rather than punishment.

To accomplish this, leaders need to reinforce candor, in every phase of operations. It has to be a recognized policy that seeing something amiss brings with it an obligation to speak up, but that is OK because speaking up will bring rewards.

If you doubt that whistle blowers are routinely punished, take the time to view this brief video by Bill Lloyd. He blew the whistle at his company and paid a heavy price for it.

Bill said, “Sometimes it’s going to hurt, but it says everything about who you are as a person.”

The concept or rewarding candor creates opportunities for leaders to see things that would otherwise be hidden and take corrective action before the tsunami gets started.

It also allows leaders to be fallible human beings and make mistakes without having them become a reason for them to spend the rest of their life in jail.

So here is a good test of your leadership ability. How transparent is your organization? Do you truly reward employees when they bring up things that do not seem right to them, or are they put down and punished?

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations. He can be reached at bwhipple@leadergrow.com or 585-392-7763.

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10 Tips to Improve Your Own Integrity

April 30, 2019

Trust and integrity are inextricably linked. I believe before you can trust other people, you must trust yourself.

That means you must not be fighting with yourself in any way, which is a pretty tall order.

Integrity is about what you do or think when nobody else in the world would know. It is an interesting topic because it is very difficult to determine your own personal level of integrity.

We all justify ourselves internally for most of the things we do. We have it figured out that to take a pencil home from work is no big deal because we frequently do work from home.

We drive 5 mph over the speed limit because not doing so would cause a traffic hazard while everyone else is going 10 mph over the limit anyway. We taste a grape at the grocery store as a way to influence our buying decision.

When we are short changed, we complain, but when the error is in the other direction, we might pocket the cash. We lie about our age. We sneak cookies. If you have never done any of these things in your whole life? Let me know, and I will nominate you for sainthood.

There are some times in life when we do something known by us to be illegal, immoral, or dumb. We do these things because they are available to us and we explain the sin with an excuse like “nobody’s perfect.”

I guess it is true that all people (except newborns) have done something of which to be ashamed. So what is the big deal? Since we all sin, why not relax and enjoy the ride?

The conundrum is where to draw a moral line in the sand. Can we do something that is wrong and learn from that error so we do not repeat it in the future? I think we can.

I believe we have not only the ability but the mandate to continually upgrade our personal integrity. Here are ten ideas that can help the process:

1. Pay attention to what you are doing – Make sure you recognize when you are crossing over the moral line.

2.  Reward yourself – When you are honest with yourself about something you did that was wrong, that is personal growth, and you should feel great about that.

3. Intend to change – Once you have become conscious of how you rationalized yourself into doing something not right, vow to change your behavior in that area.

4. Reinforce others – Sometimes other people will let you know something you did, or are about to do, is not right. Thank these people sincerely, for they are giving you the potential for personal growth.

5. Check In with yourself – Do a scan of your own behaviors and actions regularly to see how you are doing. Many people just go along day by day and do not take the time or effort to examine themselves.

6. Recognize Rationalization – We all rationalize every day. By simply turning up the volume on your conscience, you can be more alert to the temptations before you. That thought pattern will allow more conscious choices in the future.

7. Break habits – Many incorrect things come as a result of bad habits. Expose your own habits and ask if they are truly healthy for you.

8. Help others – Without being sanctimonious, help other people see when they have an opportunity to grow in integrity. Do this without blame or condemnation; instead do it with love and helpfulness.

9. Admit your mistakes to others – Few things are as helpful for growth as blowing yourself in when you did not have to.  When you admit a mistake that nobody would ever find out about, it says volumes about your personal character.

10. Ask for forgiveness – People who genuinely ask for forgiveness are usually granted it. While you cannot ever wipe the slate completely clean, the ability to ask for forgiveness will be taking concrete steps in the right direction.

Which of these 10 tips do you think is the most difficult to do, but the most important one of the bunch.  My own personal opinion is that #6 has the most power.

Some people will say, “I don’t believe I am guilty of doing the kinds of things in this article.”  If you truly believe that, I challenge you to think harder and recognize that perfection is impossible to achieve, and all of us need to tune our senses to understand our weaknesses.

We all need to build our own internal trust so we can trust other people more. To do that, it is important to follow the ten ideas listed above. These ideas will allow you to move consciously in a direction of higher personal integrity.

Bob Whipple, MBA, CPLP, is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and author in the areas of leadership and trust. He is the author of four books: 1.The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals (2003), 2. Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online (2006), 3. Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind (2009), and 4. Trust in Transition: Navigating Organizational Change (2014). In addition, he has authored over 600 articles and videos on various topics in leadership and trust. Bob has many years as a senior executive with a Fortune 500 Company and with non-profit organizations. For more information, or to bring Bob in to speak at your next event, contact him at http://www.Leadergrow.com, bwhipple@leadergrow.com or 585.392.7763

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Tap Into Trust

April 21, 2018

I am associated with a group called Trust Across America: Trust Around the World. This week, Barbara Brooks Kimmel, our CEO, announced an initiative to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the group. The initiative is called “Tap Into Trust.” We invite you to participate in the program at the attached site:

 

 

 

 

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Integrity

June 25, 2016

Most of my writing is about trust and high integrity, but this article is about low integrity. We know it exists because there are numerous examples in our daily life that point to individuals doing something that they espouse is for the greater good, but is really to advance their own purposes.

I have been told to stay away from sex, religion, and politics in public writing, so I will not reveal any political bias here; however, it is easy to detect some pockets of low integrity in certain sectors.

What constitutes low integrity versus gamesmanship on any particular day depends on the issue at hand and which side of an issue a particular person sits.

In reality, we exist in a sea of low integrity, and this article is intended to make us more aware of the difficulty sorting through what is a problem with integrity and what was well intended but flawed behavior.

When we see flagrant violations of integrity, it is not hard to come to agreement that the person was duping the public. There are hundreds of examples of this from Bernie Madoff to John Edwards. In the extreme, some people just do what benefits them regardless of who it hurts.

The other extreme is also easy to spot. In any community you can find people who give amazing amounts of time and money to support causes while expecting nothing in return. Whether it be time, talent, treasure or all three, these people have found that to give back is the reward in itself.

The extremes are easy to identify, but the majority of actions taken by people in routine business or personal decisions are somewhere between those extremes. At some point you cross the moral like between high integrity and low integrity.

It is not my desire to judge anyone in this article. I think each person has to decide on a case by case basis where the moral line exists. That decision tells a lot about the ethical fiber of the person, and yet it is not so simple to decide which activities are OK and which ones have crossed the line.

For some people, anything short of saintly behavior is wrong while others will draw the line between good and bad just short of something being illegal.

At its core, integrity is about honesty. If we purport to be taking an action to advance a noble cause yet really are mostly trying to increase our own wealth, then we may be guilty of low integrity?

To understand if an action is good or bad, we really need to dig deep into our psyche to understand our true motivations. For example, maybe we really did take that action to help reduce homelessness, and the improvement in our status was simply a by-product we obtained by networking with many new people.

The trigger for this article came from a discussion about the magnitude of low integrity in the world and that we only observe a tiny fraction of the deceit that goes on. Most of it goes undetected, because we are simply unaware that the person had an ulterior motive.

An even deeper question is how would the person himself come to grips with his own true intentions. In other words, where is the line of demarcation between doing something for others and helping one’s self?

It is fascinating to have the debate with myself trying to figure out if I have high integrity. Let’s examine a specific example for clarity.

I have shared an insightful blog every week for the past seven years. I chose to set it up totally free because of three statements in my own strategic framework.

1) I have a Value for my business that states “Give more than you receive,”

2) another Value states “Giving away content is a good thing to do,” and

3) one of my corporate Behaviors is “Go the extra mile to help others.”

That all sounds altruistic, but do I have some kind of ulterior motive in the back of my mind? Do I want to further the cause of my business? Of course I do! That is not a bad thing to do. But then am I giving away content not just to help other people but with some hope that the universe will find ways to return the favor?

You can go slowly insane trying to decipher motives, and nearly all of the time the true motivations are hidden from view. We fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing good just for the sake of doing good. Perhaps some of us actually do that. I will never know.

I have done a lot of volunteer work myself, but this year I am attempting to do more of it by tripling the amount of time I spend helping others with no direct return.

The “pay it forward” mindset is an approach to living that is highly appealing. It is fun to help other people, even when you know there will be no direct payback.

In fact, there is a payback, and it happens instantly. It is called satisfaction or self esteem. So the person who says, “I volunteer to help out this cause because in the end it makes me feel good,” that person is not guilty of low integrity.

We need to realize that there is always a return for every good deed. It does not spell incorrect behavior to do good things simply for the joy it brings, but when we do something that looks good on the surface, but in reality we are raking in the cash from some unseen source, then we are likely guilty of low integrity.

The line between high integrity and low integrity must be drawn by each individual based on his or her level of morality. My hope is that more people will examine their true intentions rather than rationalize questionable behaviors.

Bob Whipple, MBA, CPLP, is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and author in the areas of leadership and trust. He is the author of: The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, and Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind. Bob has many years as a senior executive with a Fortune 500 Company and with non-profit organizations. For more information, or to bring Bob in to speak at your next event, contact him at http://www.Leadergrow.com, bwhipple@leadergrow.com or 585.392.7763

3 Comments | Candor creates trust, Communications, Enabling Actions, HR, leadership, Trust, Trust and breach of trust, Trust and motivation, Trust and respect | Tagged: , , | Permalink
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