As you saw on the “Leadership Principles” page, acting with integrity is one of my core values…as it is for many of us!
Integrity is an interesting concept, however. Sure there is a textbook definition – something like: the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; a moral uprightness. Stated differently, we often hear that integrity is “doing the right thing when no one is looking” which is a platitude that sounds great but isn’t immediately translatable for one key reason. The “right thing” isn’t always as obvious as we’d like.
Anyone can do the right thing relative to obvious circumstances: Should I steal? Should I commit fraud? Should I blatantly lie and mislead? Of course not!
For me, acting with integrity is a little more nuanced. So many situations we approach in our careers and lives don’t have a clear right or wrong answer, that I aspire to not do anything that feels wrong. It doesn’t mean I do the right thing every time because often I don’t know exactly what right is.
An example: a few years ago we decided to reinvest a portion our first annual business profits in our staff (which was the first for our organization). We easily could have chosen to just roll the money back to the ownership or keep it is a buffer for potential tough times ahead but both of those felt like the wrong thing. We could have provided year end bonuses. We could have had a big party. Instead we decided we’d take our profits and share them in the form of annual raises, again a first for the organization – setting a precedent that we’d do this every year going forward. Once we landed on instituting raises, we went about determining how we’d administer: does everyone get one? Do we just split the total by X people? Just top performers? Who gets how much? Why? What about if you just started? Or you’ve been with us years?
There were lots of logistics to go through and lot of choices to make. Ultimately we came up with a plan to give the majority of the organization modest raises to their hourly compensation. Was that the “right thing”? Would a lump sum have been better? Or weighting the raises more heavily to top performers? I honestly don’t know. We tweaked the plan the next year based on employee feedback and I would imagine the process has been modified each year since.
How does all this tie back to “act with integrity” you ask? Simple: we didn’t do the wrong thing (not share profits with those who earned it) and we were transparent about what we chose to do and how it was administered. To me, that was integrity – it doesn’t mean we did the absolute right thing (because that’s impossible to define) but we were sure that we did not do the wrong thing. And I slept great at night knowing we made decisions I could feel good about.
View from the Middle 