There’s a Price on Your Integrity
Integrity is an important part of leadership
You always knew integrity was an important facet of leadership. But did you know there’s a direct correlation between your company’s profitability and the integrity of its managers and executives? Tony Simons, associate professor in Organization Management at Cornell University quantified it in a detailed study of 76 Holiday Inn franchises around the United States. He looked at the profitability of each hotel and also gathered employee feedback on statements such as: “My manager practices what he/she preaches,” and “When my manager promises something, I can be certain that it will happen.”
Honesty Adds to the Bottom Line
in: The Hindu
Honesty can add to the bottom line
You know WYSIWYG as ‘what you see is what you get’. What is DWYSYWD? “Do what you say you will do,” explains Jim Kouzes in the foreword to a forthcoming book by Tony Simons: The Integrity Dividend: Leading by the Power of Your Word ( www.josseybass.com). This is the most important leadership lesson you’ll ever learn, stresses Kouzes.
‘Integrity’ may appear to be an old-fashioned word; yet, in 2005, it was the single most looked-up word on the online Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, informs Simons. “Which implies that people are not sure what integrity means,” he reasons.
Integrity Pays Dividends
Does integrity really pay off on the bottom line?
Tony Simons says it does, and he has hard data to back it up.
Simons, a professor at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, surveyed employees at 76 hotels. He found that hotels where workers say their bosses keep their word and do what they say they’ll do turned a higher profit than those where workers are leery about their bosses’ integrity.
How does that difference translate into money? Each hotel happier with management’s integrity drew $250,000 more in profit a year, he found. “It was the single biggest predictor of profitability among the things you can control,” said Simons, who wrote the new book “The Integrity Dividend.”
The Network Effect of Integrity
Exploring Individual & Organizational Implications
Implications for Individual Performance
For individuals, there are two types of word / action alignment: internal and external. Thinking about something and resolving to take action is the same as having a conversation with someone else and make a commitment. Because the commitment is silent, there is no external pressure to deliver. Predictably, the commitments we make to ourselves are often the first to go. Consider the resolutions many of us make each year. We may resolve to eat better, exercise regularly or spend more time with family. How many years in a row have you made the same resolutions?
External integrity involves the commitments you make in a conversation with someone else where there is outside accountability. Even when we deliver on the big commitments, we regularly break our word on the smaller things. How many times have you been late to a meeting? How many times have you said you would send someone a document or forward an email or set up a time to talk and forgotten about it? How many times have you promised to be home from work at a certain time and not kept your word?
Each day we break our promises and commitments to others and ourselves. It has become so commonplace that these small breaches of behavioral integrity are rarely questioned – but they are noticed. In cases where they are called out, we craft legitimate sounding excuses, which only serve to further widen the breach.
It’s very simple. Every time you say you are going to do something and don’t, an integrity breach is created. As managers and leaders, we want to be seen as having integrity. When we know that our words and actions don’t align, or are perceived to be out of alignment, we must invest energy in either bringing them into alignment or convincing others that they are in alignment when in fact they are not. How do we do that? We justify ourselves, make excuses and convince those around us to buy into our reasons and explanations – all the while, widening the integrity breach. Over time, these breaches exact a psychological and emotional toll that leads to deteriorations in performance. The energy required to maintain appearances slowly wears us down. We begin to resist being around certain people or situations because they require too much energy. Our enthusiasm declines, things that were once enjoyable become difficult and a general sense of struggle begins to prevail (LEBD, 2002).
Opening the Integrity Conversation
I am excited to launch this website and to dedicate it to raising the integrity level on the planet. To learning more about how integrity works and why it is so darn difficult. To figuring out more great tips for managing so as to capture the integrity dividend. And to getting more and more people to talk and think about it.
Because integrity is really difficult. And really consequential. It is a challenge that is worthy of us all. And we have not collectively spent enough time figuring it out. Not even close.
My hope is to create a community that brings together managers and scholars, so that we can pool our collective wisdom, and offer support and challenge to each other around integrity. In concrete terms, I hope that this community will assist managers in leading and/or selling with greater integrity, and will assist scholars in exploring this wondrous and relatively unexamined aspect of doing business.
I hope that the articles I post here will stimulate conversations. I hope that the forum will present a way for any interested reader to post questions, stories, or observations and so advance the conversation further. And for everyone to feel at liberty to help me build a powerful resource.
I imagine managers supporting managers, scholars supporting scholars, and each professional group supporting the other by offering insight and experiences and by making sure that our ideas are both practical and logically consistent.
I intend for this website to make a difference.
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Integrity as Management Practice
Christine Pietschmann wrote this as a principal with Root Paradigm, Inc. She is presently employed as director of training and leadership development for Bell Canada.
SUMMARY
As a manager, your Behavioral Integrity can make the difference between average and exemplary team performance. Behavioral Integrity is defined as the alignment between words and actions. Research shows that employee perception of behavioral integrity in their managers has implications for individual, team and corporate performance. Employees who perceive strong behavioral integrity in their managers show increased trust, commitment and willingness to go the extra mile, thus improving customer satisfaction, decreasing employee turnover and improving profitability (Simons, 2002).
Recent studies have quantified the bottom line impact of integrity on an organization. In one important study, a 2.5% increase in profit could be seen for every 1/8-point improvement in perceived behavioral integrity on a 5-point scale. In this particular case, it translated into a $250,000 bottom line impact per 1/8-point change (Simons, 2002).
Based on a review of relevant business, research, philosophical and organization development viewpoints relating to the notion of behavioral integrity, this paper proposes a management practice framework to identify and repair integrity breaches that directly impact corporate performance.
THE INTEGRITY / PERFORMANCE LINK
The word ‘integrity’ is often used interchangeably with ‘ethics’. Dictionary definitions suggest observance of moral and ethical principles, confirming the widely held understanding of integrity as ‘doing the right thing’.
Research shows that integrity can be viewed in another light that has profound and practical applications for management. Coined “Behavioral Integrity” (BI), it is defined as the congruence between what one says and does. In this context ‘doing the right thing’ is less relevant to your perceived behavioral integrity than simply doing what you say you will do (Simons, 2002).
