“In no area of corporate life is leadership commitment more important than creating an integrity culture.”
Ben Heinman: Avoiding Integrity Land Mines, Harvard Business Review, 2007/04
Leaders almost everywhere are in the firing line over integrity. With the recent history of financial services malpractice around the globe, more local scandals in the UK over MPs expenses, and the growth demand for corporate social responsibility, few would try to deny the importance of leaders demonstrating integrity.
Yet while integrity is too important to ignore, is it also too vague to really matter? What do we really mean by integrity? Can we expect business leaders to do more than verbally subscribe to the idea, much as they have traditionally done in asserting “people are our most important asset?” In other words, is integrity merely “nice to have”, rather than a “must have” for organisations and their leaders? Finally, is integrity something we can actually develop in our leaders and if so how?
To make sense of the multiplicity of explanations of Integrity, we can view it rather like a precious diamond, something almost immutable, hard to alter and yet an essential part of oneself or one’s organisation. Few diamonds are utterly flawless and much the same applies to integrity. When we examine it closely in the real world it too has many facets not just a single side or interpretation.
Integrity is: Discerning what is right and wrong; acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost; saying openly that you are acting on what you understand to be right or wrong.
Integrity provides developers and HR professionals with an exceptional opportunity that may not immediately be recognised for what it is. Here is a vital area of people development that demands both good judgement and personal leadership from the professional adviser.
Tough times can lead to leaders losing sight of integrity and how to apply it. This is where developers can play such a vital role. First, how advisers conduct themselves therefore within the organisation can shape the way that it responds to integrity issues. This goes beyond supporting compliance systems, devising or ensuring enforcement of rules of behaviour. It requires advisers to personally demonstrate integrity in their own behaviour, to know for instance what they stand for and be able to go beyond the rules to guide company leaders in their own attitudes towards integrity.
Secondly, integrity poses HR and professional developers with a personal challenge of how to frame and make effective arguments for its importance and what needs to happen to promote it amongst the leadership and the organisation as a whole.
There are some purely commercial arguments for developers to espouse and promote integrity and learning about it within their organisations. For example, the 2008-2009 KPMG Integrity Survey found that the three out of four employees (74%) had observed or had first-hand knowledge of wrong doing within their organisation during the previous 12 months. “Pressures, incentives, inadequate resources and job uncertainty continue to be main drivers of fraud and misconduct.”
Consumers are also important drivers of company integrity that leaders simply cannot ignore. “Customers expect the company to do the right thing” is how the UK managing director of Mars puts it and many other companies have found that it purely commercial terms it pays to be ethical, for example through cutting costs or sustaining supplies or allowing their customers to regard themselves as ethical.
Developers need to acquire the assurance to explain to policy makers how an organisation that demonstrates integrity contributes to employees’ pride, engagement with their jobs and customer loyalty. Integrity has also been shown to enhance company brand or reputation, improve efficiency, attract staff, conserve and sustain resources and mitigate business risk.
More of this in a forthcoming publication from Maynard Leigh Associates: INTEGRITY: ARE YOUR LEADERS UP TO IT? (To receive a copy or a link to the paper please contact info@maynardleigh.co.uk)
