Act with Integrity | Fundamental #1

Demonstrate doing the right thing in all your actions and all your decisions, especially when no one is looking. Always tell the truth.  Acknowledge and own your mistakes, clean them up and make appropriate corrections. 

For the past two decades, we have been helping companies to consciously build their cultures by identifying behavioral practices expected from leadership.After defining these behaviors, you must also find a way to ritualize them in order to design a culture that lasts over time.One of our rituals is to share our fundamentals each week. This is round four of discussing our 26 behavioral practices we call “The Momentum Way.”A great deal of our coaching and consulting programs are based on a very rich conversation involving accountability.There would be no way to even begin that conversation without a foundation of integrity.  In every business we work with, we discover together, that at the root of what is not working is a lack of integrity that has unknowingly eroded trust and effective action.This is not an easy conversation, nor a comfortable one – for them or for us.  And, there is no way to proceed in creating a culture of accountability without facing the lack of integrity head on – as individuals, as teams and ultimately, as an organization as a whole.

What feels like the bad news, is actually the good news:  It starts with each of us as individuals.

I recently returned from a work assignment in Botswana.  There were four of us on the team of consultants delivering the program.  It had been quite a few years since we had all worked together.There was a great deal of preparation involved and we started with the process of “cleaning up” anything left hanging from our past interactions with each other.It would have been way more comfortable and easier to just say, “I’m good.”We didn’t.We went straight to it and dealt with past perceptions and the impacts we had on each other, most of which happened unknowingly.

This started us on the journey to creating an environment of integrity that would allow us to form a bond of trust.

It also gave us a platform for holding ourselves and each other accountable for what we said we would do.By doing this, we were able to then hold our clients accountable for where integrity was missing for them.Not from a place of criticism or blame, it was from a place in our hearts where we were holding them to their GREATNESS. 

Each day we were together we built more and more trust between us.

We shifted from being the consultants to being their committed partners. What a difference this has made in their lives, in our lives, and in what is now possible for the future.I invite you to share with us your stories, challenges and outcomes you’ve experienced in taking on the day-to-day practice of living a life of integrity in the comments below. All my best,Marlene