20 Mar Integrity is an overlooked benefit of stating your values
Reading Time: 2 minutesChoices are chances. Go this way or that. Do this, not that. On repeat, hundreds of daily moments where your actions say, ‘this is who I am’.
Intrinsic to work. They get shaped by the processes, policies and protocols powering every enterprise. And in the rumble of the everyday doing, become a signal of both individual and enterprise integrity.
Along with trust and honesty, integrity joins what I call the ‘values holy trinity’. Scan any list, and one or more usually appear. Yet, they are more civil values. Woven into the fabric of civil society, when they fray, so does it.
And many people I’ve worked with cite challenges to their integrity in how their organisations do things. By the behaviour modelled or allowed. Holding them back from the pull of something which feels wrong, or providing a push to step up or into what’s required.
In the TV show Madam Secretary, Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord testifies to an oversight committee about some choices she’s made. Her husband Henry says “When everything seems to be lacking in integrity, you know what you do? You find it in yourself. You change the world right from where you’re standing.”
Leaving aside the ‘change the world’ quip, the integrity rubber meets the office ‘where you’re standing’. Outright illegal stuff aside, behaviour and circumstances can and will test you on even average days. But buttressing a broken system with people’s individual integrity is unfair to them.
In fact, the 1540s meaning of ‘integrity’ specifically calls out fair dealing as a cornerstone. More fully, it is defined as “soundness of moral principle and character; entire uprightness or fidelity, especially in regard to truth and fair dealing.”
I don’t come to work to test my resolve and demonstrate daily fortitude. I come to work to work. To contribute, hopeful that maybe, even just some of the time, my effort matters in some small sliver of a way.
The risk of relying on individual integrity lies behind the lines they will and won’t cross. Lines you won’t see or know until they show up in their choices. Which is why any fair dealing organisation will state genuine values. Not integrity as a value, but demonstrated by having them.
Without values every choice becomes something people must navigate, consuming precious energy in the process. An endless rinse and repeat of my personal sense of who I am. Alongside whatever is called for in the moment, constrained by whatever the environment allows.
Even one value can help ground and connect those efforts. Three is a good number. More than that, people struggle to remember them, let alone put them to work.
Climb the values pyramid here.
When I see an organisation without any stated values. Or worse, a dusty poster on the wall. Staff often struggle with how their organisation does things. The energy tax of constantly figuring what matters becomes an untenable burden.
Their personal integrity starts chirping, and before you can say canary in the team’s chat, they opt out of caring. And if you’re lucky, they leave.
Next up, I explore what happens when they stay.
Thanks for reading.