SYSTEM INTEGRITY.

Nothing undermines trust more than low or no integrity. Most of us have had the irritating experience of streaming a movie where the audio and video don’t match. Our typical response is something like: “C’MON MAN!” The source of this frustration is not the quality of the sound, or the video, rather it’s that what the characters are ‘saying’ doesn’t match what they are ‘doing.’ In essence, what we are watching lacks integrity. We recall from elementary school that an ‘integer’ (the Latin root for integrity) is a ‘whole number.’ So, individuals and systems with high integrity are not fragmented or fractured (fractions) - rather, they are committed to having little or no separation between what they do and what they say. And in systems with high integrity there aren’t numerators and denominators - people on top and people on the bottom. Which is not to say people don’t occupy different organizational positions with varying degrees of responsibility, only that the organizational culture is ‘results driven’ rather than ‘status driven.’ The focus of high integrity organizations is ‘wholeness’ (“every voice matters”) achieving effectiveness through integration and collaboration - such that leading for optimal effectiveness means leading with transparency to foster and increase trust. #LeadWithIntegrity

Image by cookie_studio on Freepik