If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.
—GORDON A. EADIE
Total integrity is the first lever of primary greatness. People who have lost integrity live and work in a world of seeming to be something they are not. Living a false life is a heavy burden on your conscience and on the people who rely on you. Total integrity lifts that burden from your life. Those who have primary greatness are people for whom total integrity is deeply inscribed in their character. This chapter is about centering your life on the principle of total integrity.
I think that talking about ethics often takes us down the wrong path. Many people confuse ethics with legal issues, or they take a departmental or compartmental approach to ethics, rather than an integrated and organic approach.
By contrast, with an organic approach to integrity, we naturally see everything through an ethical lens; consequently, everything is integrated, not seen in different frames or departments.
Primary greatness is about what is; secondary greatness is all about what seems to be.
Wrestling with issues of integrity, Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!” He counsels, “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” And he reasons, “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused.” To his mother, the Queen, Hamlet responds, “Seems, madam! nay, it is; I know not ‘seems.’ ”
For people who have lost integrity, seems is all they know. They live and work in a world of seeming to be something they are not. They worry more about how others see them than about who they are. They are actors who wear a false face to cover up covert operations or maintain an image.
When I was working in North Carolina, I was given a shirt imprinted with the state motto in Latin, Esse quam videri, which means “To be rather than to seem.”
This should be the motto of every person seeking primary greatness. Unfortunately, too often “seeming to be” substitutes for real integrity. It’s “seeming” as opposed to “being.”
So how do you arrive at integrity?
I see integrity as the child of two primary character traits: humility and courage.
Humility means realizing that, over time, principles ultimately govern. A humble person doesn’t say, “I am in control,” or “I am in charge of my destiny.” That theme, so common in much of the success literature in recent decades, is a product of the social value system. And our social values may not be based on rock-solid principles, but on the shifting sands of ego or opinion.
The president of an international communications firm once showed me his company’s values statement: “We are committed to the practice of all praiseworthy values that enhance the worth of individuals and strengthen our communities.” When I asked him about his core values, he mentioned: Integrity, excellence, service, profitability, sensitivity, sincerity, and high ethical and moral standards.
I said, “There’s certainly nothing wrong with this set of corporate values, as they are closely aligned with enduring principles. However, what matters most is how you integrate them into your daily operations.” I was trying to teach what every employee already knows: An emphasis on legal, ethical, and moral standards is best made not simply with words on a poster in the corporate office, but with the attitudes and actions of people at all levels.
This humble business leader well understood the importance of walking the talk and making sure that the talk—the corporate value system—was based on principles. He realized that we are not in control, that natural laws and principles control, and that the attitude of humility is, in a sense, the mother of all virtues, because all of them come through that spirit of submission to pragmatic reality.
The father of all virtues is courage, because when put to the test, courage defines our commitment to those virtues. Eventually, every value is tested. Whether we will align our values, our lives, and our habits with those principles is the big question. Again, “To be, or not to be,” is the big question. Seeming to be is not the question.
In other words, will we really live by our principles? We may be humble, but are we courageous? Will we, in fact, swim upstream against very powerful social values or against our own individual tendencies? Will the chief good and market of our time be but to sleep and feed? Or will we put our “infinite faculty, admirable form, and godlike reason” to good use? We won’t if we lack the courage to act upon our core beliefs. In fact, our principle-centered initiatives will likely be rolled over and flattened by the latest wave of trendy social values.
When you have both humility and courage, you naturally develop integrity. Integrity means that your life is integrated around principles and that your security comes from within, not from without. It also means, as my friend suggested, maintaining “the highest levels of honesty and credibility in all relationships.”
You won’t have integrity if you lack humility, or if you have the humility but lack the courage to act on your conviction. Rather than integrity, you then have duplicity, hypocrisy, or what I call the personality ethic rather than the character ethic. People who lack integrity will give you an outward show of personality that isn’t anchored in the ethical standards of true character. It’s counterfeit. False integrity means your security still lies outside yourself. You are secure only to the degree to which you are accepted by others, and to the degree to which you compare or compete favorably with others.
At the end of my book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I confess to the reader that I personally struggle with much of what I have shared, but that the struggle is worthwhile and fulfilling because it gives meaning to my life and enables me to love, to serve, and to try again. The challenge of living with integrity is always in front of me.
I’ve been in a dialogue with myself all my life because of this. I wonder whether I have the right to teach something I don’t always live by. And in the process, I have discovered the truth of something psychologist Carl Rogers once said: “That which is most personal is most general.” Most people go through the same internal dialogue.
I have also discovered, as I have entered into this private dialogue with myself, that this secret self is the very battleground from which the insights come. The closer you get to the inner truth of who you really are, the more you get the insights that, ironically, everybody else can relate to.
Economic crises have taught us this lesson. One business after another has been humbled in recent years. The financial industry stumbled because of practices that did not always demonstrate integrity. Many great companies have been brought down by a lack of humility and awareness of the realities of what they were doing. And some have gone through some deep soul searching.
Many of us are coerced into humility, but it’s better to humble ourselves by choice. As we develop more internal security and integrity, we will then be humbled by conscience, not by circumstance, not by force.
If we don’t take account of ourselves and use our self-knowledge, we’ll always be projecting our motivations onto the outside world. With our limited vision, we think we see the world. We mistake observation for introspection. We misunderstand ourselves, other people, and the world if we are constantly in a state of projection and observation. We must pay the price through honest introspection to gain self-knowledge.
Each of us is a composite of three selves: the public self (our public image and persona), the private self (what we do in our own private world of family and close associates when we let our hair down), and our deep, secret self (our inner self where we can examine the scripts of our lives—our motivations, tendencies, and habits rooted in our genetic coding, our environment, and our social conditioning). Integrity arises—or fails to—from that deep, secret self.
Most people try to exercise influence through an outside-in approach, based in their public selves. However, people who are highly effective exercise influence through an Inside-Out Approach based in their secret selves. If you reveal authentically who you are deep down, people will learn to trust you for your genuineness.
As you come to know yourself better and become open to influence at the private and secret levels, you are in a better position to influence others because they’ll sense that you are open to influence, open to feedback, and they’ll be more open themselves. The primary reason you have more influence with others is that you first know yourself.
Great minds have taught “know thyself,” “control thyself,” and “give thyself,” and I would emphasize that there is power in that sequence.
For example, suppose I hear a rumor that you are saying and doing things to hurt me. By exercising self-knowledge, I might say to myself, “Now, before you overreact to this news, remember, Stephen, that you have this paranoid tendency to think people are against you. Don’t interpret what people are saying in terms of that paranoia. Instead, go to them and get additional data.”
Now, notice what happens. When I take into account my paranoid tendency and get additional data, I often find that my fears are unfounded. And if I have integrity, I can say to you, “I’m very upset, but I’m trying to deal with this in a responsible way and not overreact emotionally.” I’m taking responsibility for myself. I’m using self-knowledge. I’m not attacking you on the basis of a rumor. Thus, when you and I interact, I can allow you to influence me.
Legendary psychologist Carl Rogers says that when we feel that our internal congruency is disturbed, we use various psychological defenses such as denial, intellectualization, rationalization, or projection. Projection happens when I project my own motivations onto other people. We judge others by their behavior, ourselves by our intentions.
I took part in an experiment in Bethel, Maine, where researchers performed a psychological dissonance study on a group of us to identify what defense mechanisms we tend to use when push comes to shove in our lives. They identified those who used intellectualization as a defense mechanism, those who used rationalization, those who used denial, and those who used projection. They put us into groups of people of the same ilk, then gave us tasks to perform.
My defense mechanism was intellectualization. You can imagine what my group was like. We were a bunch of academics who had chosen our profession partly because it was safe. We could escape into our minds and into theoretical abstractions. Well, we were assigned this task to do together, but we couldn’t move it forward at all. We suffered from the paralysis of analysis.
In another room, those in the projection group were all transferring their own motivations onto each other. They got into blaming each other, and they got bogged down too.
The people in the denial group couldn’t move forward either, because everyone was saying, “Oh, no, that’s not what the assignment means. They don’t really want us to do that.”
This experiment taught me again the importance of examining my own motives and methods for dealing with hard problems. I was reminded of how easy it is for me to fall into the trap of intellectualizing away my responsibility for my own life. You might be using other defense mechanisms to fall into the same trap.
Our influence with others increases only to the degree with which we have internal and external congruency. I once witnessed this dynamic in action when a friend, who had offended me deeply, apologized to me. I said to him, “I can’t tell you how much I admire that sincere apology. How did you reach the point where you could do that?” And he said, “I had to go deep within myself and carry on a personal dialogue. I carried on the dialogue to the point where I had enough self-knowledge that I could ask myself, ‘What am I going to obey—my ego or my conscience?’ ” Then he said, “I decided to obey my conscience.”
My friend is such a conscience-directed person that, if he gets into a battle with his ego, he’ll go with his conscience every time because he’s done it so often. Listening to his conscience is an ingrained habit with him. He has great influence with others because of his integrity.
Many people have an internal dialogue, but they lack the courage to confess an error or to apologize or make the change in public. Courage is a function of integrity. If we don’t cultivate integrity over time, we won’t have the courage to confess mistakes and correct course.
Integrity produces unquestionable benefits in your life.
• One child of integrity is wisdom. If your security comes from within, you simply have better judgment. You’re not in an overreactive state; you don’t dichotomize; you don’t catastrophize; you’re not extreme. You have better overall life balance. With wisdom, you see things in correct perspective and proportion; you don’t overreact or underreact. You “suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” as Shakespeare wrote.
• A second child of integrity is the Abundance Mentality. When you get your security from within, you are not in a constant state of comparison from without. Therefore, you can have an abundance mindset toward life. You stop worrying about others getting more credit or having more success in life. You see life as an ever-enlarging cornucopia of resources that gets larger and larger. As Hamlet said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” In the same way, if you look for scarcity, that’s what you’ll get. If you look for the abundant, perhaps hidden, resources all around you, you’ll be able to leverage those resources.
• A third child of integrity is synergy. When your security is not tied up with what other people think of you, you can work with them to come up with better ideas in a spirit of win-win. You can express your ideas with courage and consideration with the intent of finding the best possible alternative, not simply to get credit for the best idea.
• Another sweet fruit of personal and organizational integrity is relationships of trust with all stakeholders. You simply can’t have integral relationships without genuine personal integrity. Many bottom-line business benefits—including competitiveness, flexibility, responsiveness, quality, economic value added, and customer service—depend on relationships of trust. At bottom, only people with integrity are trustworthy.
With so much riding on integrity and ethics, why are breaches in ethics, both individual and corporate, all too common?
For years now we’ve seen a heavy emphasis on ethics training in colleges and in organizations.
Organizations spend lots of money on ethics programs. Sadly, according to one recently retired ethics director, “Some executives are concerned primarily with public image and perceptions. In fact, the ethics program is often started as a response to public outcry or internal inquiry. Ethics directors serve as a point of contact for whistleblowers and for unempowered and uninformed individuals who don’t know how else to get a problem resolved. When leaders justify the means by the ends, people pick up the signals. They note who is hired, promoted, and rewarded—and why. They see who gets away with murder and who condones inappropriate behavior. Having an ethics program may make people more sensitive to such issues as sexual harassment or sexist language, but they rarely stop or even slow the avalanche of unethical behavior. In fact, the program may just drive unethical behavior further underground, making people even more devious.”
To work at looking ethical is a fundamentally flawed approach, because it’s not about humility—accepting principles, aligning with those principles, submitting to them, and obeying them. It’s more about pride—having some compartment inside a person or an organization called ethics or values, but not deeply integrated.
As universities and corporations add classes or offices dealing with ethics, people begin to see issues through that departmental frame of reference rather than having their perspectives governed by a universal frame of reference—a framework of integrity through which they see everything.
The ethics dilemma is analogous to the quality dilemma. You can’t have a so-called department of quality and think you’ve done the job. You can’t add quality to a product after it is finished; rather, you have to design and build it in from the beginning, seeing everything you do through the lens of quality. Likewise, you can’t inspect in ethics. When everybody accepts personal responsibility to behave in ethical ways, you hardly have to think about it, because ethical behavior is your nature, not the responsibility of some artificial department down the hall.
When leaders are open and exact in their observance of ethical codes, they inspire others to do the same. One leader, when stepping down as president of a large university, was commended by the chairman of the board: “A few reach the pinnacle of professional or social or financial success through devious means. Others may be more virtuous but still show a lack of sensitivity to loved ones, friends, and colleagues as they climb to the top. Those who combine honor, integrity, devotion, and sensitivity to family and friends are rare indeed. You are one of the rare ones.”
Too often ethics are separate from the everyday life of the organization. Professional ethicists may huddle and talk, but most of their practice is reactive in response to people not walking their talk, feeling that the only wrong is in getting caught. They may handle a complaint to allay a lawsuit, but they are not preventative or integrative.
As long as there is a great disparity between the corporate ethical stance and individual behavior, the individual will feel no obligation to live by corporate ethical codes.
Your vision, mission, ethics, and values statements will be even more valuable if you don’t rush the creative process, announce the result, then ignore or dismiss the document as some meaningless formal exercise. As you involve people in the creation of a code of ethics and review it regularly with them, you build humility and courage into the culture.
The ethics statement becomes a constitution when it becomes the center from which everything else flows. Then you don’t have this “seeming to be ethical.” In organizations of integrity, ethics is not just another department. The organization serves as a second family. People are humble because they know that principles are in control, not people, programs, and politics. They not only believe in timeless principles, but also have the courage to act on them.
• Write in your journal: What does it mean to you to be a person of total integrity? Choose one area in your life in which you could show more integrity, then do it. How does it feel?
• In what areas of your life are you an example of courage? of humility? To what extent do you enjoy the fruits of integrity in your life now? Write down one circumstance in which you could have shown more courage and another circumstance in which you could have shown more humility. Try it.