Training & Development
Personal integrity in the workplace
Trainer and Motivational Speaker, Frank Newberry, is convinced that personal integrity is vital to a successful career. Here, he makes the case for personal integrity in the workplace
“Even if I was a spy or a secret agent, and my success was based on telling lies and being deceitful, I could still retain some integrity by being loyal to Queen and country”
t took me a while to accept that people make a choice about whether or not to show personal integrity at work. I have always just assumed that, if my employer was going to pay me to work, then I was obliged to deliver all the components of integrity like honesty, truthfulness, reliability and honour.
I
Even if I was a spy or a secret agent, and my success was based on telling lies and being deceitful, I could still retain some integrity by being loyal to Queen and country. Personal integrity was always a vital expectation I had of myself and, in turn, it was an expectation I had of colleagues and my employer. Why would people at my workplace not have integrity?
More a matter of personal maturity than personal integrity
Well, like many people, I noticed early on in my work life that reality often does not match expectation. We have all met people who steal from their employer, most often by starting work late and finishing early. They are on the premises, but just not working.
They might continue in this fashion until management puts a stop to it. I take this type of behaviour to be more a matter of personal maturity than personal integrity i.e. immature employees exploiting immature supervisory staff. A relatively minor problem that can be fixed with some training.
The need for realism as opposed to idealism
I find a lack of integrity in senior management a much bigger challenge. The lack of personal integrity at higher levels has plagued society all through
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history. In 16th century Florence, the much maligned Nicolo Machiavelli emphasised the need for realism in these matters as opposed to idealism. He was tortured and banished for his remarks, but not before he famously wrote:
‘There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This … arises partly from fear of the opponents … and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them’.
We had been asking too many difficult questions
Let me illustrate the need for personal integrity in the workplace with a real life example. For a number of years, I was employed by one of the largest companies in the country as a trainer and consultant. My division had been cut back by two thirds (from seventy-six down to twenty-seven people) - officially because savings were needed, but mainly because we had become a nuisance.
We had been asking too many difficult questions and challenging the assumptions made by senior operational managers too often. We were only doing what we were trained to do but, after a year or two, very senior management started to tell our senior manager to ‘back off ’. Our senior manager took this as an attack on his own professional and personal integrity and resisted strongly. He was sacked.
Now I was not one of those in the twenty-
seven who had kept their jobs, but I was clinging onto gainful employment by virtue of working on a project led by the director who had sacked our senior manager.
The project was complex, somewhat frustrating to work on, but vital, we thought, to the future of the company. My director had been invited to a meeting at the very highest level in the organisation and wanted me go along with him to answer questions about the progress of this complex project.
We need them more than they need us, so ‘be nice’
He told me the meeting was a routine briefing, but I may be needed to answer some questions of detail. My director repeatedly stressed that I should not contend or challenge anyone at this top level meeting.
He also said quite clearly that ‘we need them (very senior management) more than they need us, so ‘be nice’. I had been to this type of meeting, at a slightly lower level, before and, at that meeting, I did not successfully challenge the destructive cynicism of a very senior manager. I was intimidated that day and ended up being ‘nice’ when, with a little more courage and competence, I could have represented my division a little better than I did.
Perhaps this was in the back of my mind when I duly agreed to go with my director, and ‘be nice’, at my very first meeting with the top brass at the company’s head office in the City of London.
The project was doomed to fail
The meeting was in the opulent office of the second-in-command of the entire
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