Why it’s important to reinforce honesty and integrity in your organization.
Mark Cohen
“…the airwaves resonate with accusations of lying and with disputes concerning every variant of prevarication, evasion, outright lying, and perjury.”
Last night’s news? It’s actually a 1999 quote from Sissela Bok in her book, “Lying: Moral Choice in the Public and Private Life.”
Employees are influenced by the significant leadership models they see in our companies. In these times, what are we learning and what are we promoting about lying and morality? In the US, the style of leadership people see exhibited by the President of the country can have a significant effect on the style of leadership we see in our businesses.
Helping employees remain confident in the company’s values of right and wrong when they see moral expediency dominating the headlines is a big job. If your company promotes ethical values and has a mission statement based on concepts like integrity and treating customers and employees fairly, it may be a good time to renew the commitment to those concepts and remind everyone that the company promotes what’s right and honest irrespective of what we see in the news.
The truth about lying is that it’s often a sloppy shortcut, an easy means to an end, unencumbered by the harsh reality of the truth. Blurring the lines of what’s right can quickly devolve into the land of moral fuzziness.
The advice columnist Ann Landers spent much of her life advising people on how, to tell the truth in difficult situations. How do I: tell my children they hurt my feelings, tell my boss they did something thoughtless, tell my neighbor to please (at long last) return my electric knife…Why was she offering this advice for decades? The indisputable truth of the truth is that being honest is often the harder path.
Our job as leaders, in a time of moral ambiguity, is to reinforce that within our organizations, we are guided by our commitment to honesty and integrity. It’s important to say that doing what we know is right is what we stand for and what we intend to demonstrate every day.