Integrity

DEFINITION
The practice of being tenaciously honest and living out strong personal values

WHAT IS IT?
A person of integrity lives by a code of ethics and high moral standards that others respect and admire. They always tell the truth.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT
Friends, clients, and colleagues all want to deal with people who have integrity. If we withhold or compromise the truth, people will quickly learn that we cannot be trusted. Similarly, if we over-inflate the likelihood of particular outcomes, our strengths, or our past successes, people will eventually discount our abilities.

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Suggestions for Improvement

Define Your Core Values
First, identify your three most important virtues. Write them down. These can be what you strive to live by, or what you believe are most imperative for a fair, honest and successful legal practice. Those lists may even be identical. One of the best ways to build integrity is to define the kind of person you want to be and the kind of firm you want to cultivate. How do we want to be known by others? Evaluate your performance regularly to determine if those values are evident in your life. Ask other if they see these values lived out on a consistent basis.
Always Tell the Truth
Second, make an unwavering commitment to telling the truth – always. Be honest about potential hurdles you envision as well as realistic with the case outcome and timeframe. We have to resist the urge to cover up our mistakes or to make ourselves look better than we really are. Instead, we should candidly acknowledge our mistakes and weaknesses and learn from them. Doing so also helps us to err on the side of humility rather than grandiosity. Let others brag on us. We don’t need to do it ourselves.
Don’t Criticize Others
Finally, we need to be careful not to criticize others or make them look bad in order to elevate our own status. Be honest about other people. Strive to think the best of others and give them the benefit of the doubt. Being honest with and about ourselves and other people is at the heart of integrity.

Books to Read

The Clarity Principle: How Great Leaders Make the Most Important Decisions In Business (and What Happens When They Don’t)

Featuring compelling stories of leaders who originally succumbed to and then successfully resolved their organizations’ identity crises.

On My Honor I Will: The Journey to Integrity-Driven Leadership

The leaders who inspire and challenge us to be our very best are distinguished by something much more powerful: a reputation for integrity, duty, service, honor, and doing what is right.

Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

Dr. Henry Cloud, a clinical psychologist, leadership coach, corporate consultant and nationally syndicated radio host, shows how our character can keep us from achieving what we want to.

Integrity

By weaving together insights from philosophy, theology, history and law, along with examples drawn from current events and a dose of personal experience, Carter makes a case for integrity.

How Good People Make Tough Choices

An essential guide to ethical action updated for our challenging times, Kidder offers practical tools for dealing with the difficult moral dilemmas we face in our everyday lives.

Websites to Visit

Daniel Pink – The Surprising Science of Motivation

Pink makes the case in his book and in his TED talk for rethinking our reliance on external rewards as our motivation. Popular wisdom indicates that in order to get more out of employees in terms of quantity and quality, you need to give them external rewards, such as cash bonuses.

Tony Robbins – Why We Do What We Do and How We Can Do It Better

Personal development author and speaker Tony Robbins explains in his TED talk that when people fail to achieve something, the defining factor is a lack of resourcefulness and determination.

5 Myths of Leadership

Part of this article touches on how great leaders work harder than most other people.

Who’s Wasting Time At Work, How, Why, and What You Can Do About It

This infogram describes who wastes time at work and what their distractions are and then sums up how to stop time wasting in its tracks.

18 people Whose Incredible Work Ethic Paid Off
This article reviews 18 people, including Mark Cuban, Jeff Bezos, and Tim Cook and tells their personal stories of how they worked very hard to get to where they are today.

Integrity

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