Integrity

What Integrity means in leadership

You lead a model-making team and require every design change to be entered in the shared book. Your own last-minute alteration is missing. A colleague notices while you are reminding everyone about the rule. You add the change and put it through the same review. The special shortcut for the person who invented the system closes after a very short opening ceremony.

A standard about traceable changes serves people who must build from the plan. Integrity lets that reason govern your own alteration, even when your position makes an exception easy. If the rule is poorly designed, you can revise it openly for everyone; a private exemption leaves the burden where influence is weakest.

Integrity gives…

Consistency helps people understand what they can depend on. It also makes correction more credible: the leader can acknowledge a breach without pretending that authority exempts them from the undertaking’s ethical terms.

Finding the balance

Apply the rule through its ethical purpose, including when that purpose calls for correcting yourself or openly improving the rule.

In ordinary life

Shared credit

Use the attribution standard for your own presentation that you require from colleagues.

A revised rule

Explain a necessary change before relying on it for your own convenience.

Nearby virtues, different work

Candor

Candor states the relevant truth; Integrity keeps actions faithful to the ethical standard that truth invokes.

Contrition

Contrition acknowledges the wrong in a breach; Integrity concerns the continuing alignment of conviction and conduct.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Selective rigor is a counterfeit of Integrity when exacting standards are used to examine everyone except the person enforcing them. Integrity accepts the same ethical reason when it is inconvenient to oneself.

How to cultivate Integrity

• Name the purpose of a standard you invoke.
• Check your own recent conduct against that purpose.
• Correct a breach through the same relevant process others use.

Try it today

Choose a modest standard you ask others to follow. Check one of your own recent actions against it and correct a discrepancy within your control.

Questions worth returning to

• Would I accept this explanation from a colleague?
• Is the exception justified by the purpose or by my position?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. We must first then look at the even tenor and consistency of his principles, if he always delights in the same things, and always praises the same things, and directs and governs his life after one pattern, as becomes the noble lover of consistent friendship and familiarity.

   Plutarch, Morals: Ethical Essays
   HOW ONE MAY DISCERN A FLATTERER FROM A FRIEND.; section VII

   Plutarch tests friendship by consistency across choices. The attractive manner of a leader is weaker evidence than the pattern of conduct.

2. To act from principle in such an emergency is not to act on some abstract principle, or duty at large; it is to act upon the principle of a course of action, instead of upon the circumstances which have attended it.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals; 1. The Inner and the Outer.

   Dewey makes principle part of an actual course of action. A rule about shared changes needs to govern the leader’s next alteration.

3. For there are people who in opposite circumstances do not act consistently: they have the utmost contempt for pleasure, but in pain they are too sensitive; they are indifferent to glory, but they are crushed by disgrace; and even in their inconsistency they show no great consistency.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   BOOK I MORAL GOODNESS; section 71

   Cicero notices that resisting one temptation can coexist with surrender to another. Consistency deserves examination precisely where the pressure changes.

4. The regard to those general rules of conduct, is what is properly called a sense of duty, a principle of the greatest consequence in human life, and the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions.

   Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
   PART III. Of the foundation of our judgments concerning our own sentiments and conduct, and of the sense of duty.; CHAP. III. Of the influence and authority of the general rules of morality, and that they are justly regarded as the laws of the Deity.

   Smith describes general rules as supports for conduct beyond the feeling of the moment. A leader’s convenient exception tests that support.

5. Personal honesty exhausts no man’s duty in life; an effective life is what is demanded of us, and no isolated honesty gives us social effectiveness.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP; XXIV NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION The Will of the People

   Follett asks what personal honesty contributes to effective shared action. Integrity must enter the actual work, rather than remain a description of the leader.

6. And the promise, being made, must be kept.

   Abraham Lincoln, The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Volume Six
   Letter to James C. Conkling, 26 August 1863

   In his letter to James C. Conkling, Lincoln is defending the promise of freedom to Black soldiers. The commitment concerns people who have borne real risk, not a convenient rule to discard after receiving their service.

7. Neither in writing nor in reading wilt thou be able to lay down rules for others before thou shalt have first learned to obey rules thyself. Much more is this so in life.

   Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius
   BOOK XI.; section 29

   Marcus applies the learner’s discipline to the person who instructs. A leader’s own conduct remains within the standard they invoke.

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