Integrity

In the main the issues behind the more spectacular and well known falls from grace of leaders in the public eye could be grouped under a lack of competence, a lack of support or loyalty from those they sought to lead and a lack or failure of integrity.

Of all of these the last is the most egregious, the most fatal. We so much want our leaders to be unfailingly decent, an obvious or perceived flaw in integrity can be the toxin that kills them off. All of us have a reputation, something we are known for, sometimes different from what we would like to be known for.

At the core of this is the simple but fragile heart, our integrity; always under challenge, under tests both trivial and profound every day of our lives. In business, integrity is just as important as in any of the great public offices.

It is interesting to observe that many of the modern corporate failures in leadership have come from a failure in integrity by the leaders in question or, equally serious, a failure to diligently protect the integrity of the business, on which the owners rely.

Some may argue that this is more a case of incompetence but surely one of the first and fundamental obligations of competent business leadership is above all to protect the reputation and integrity of the business; to that degree the integrity of the business is the integrity of the leader.

During the past couple of decades the business community has seen an exponential increase in compliance-based regulations. These regulations have grown from a raft of incidents where corporations and their leaders behaved poorly, leading to great losses among shareholders. While many of these regulations seem to business to be burdensome and frustrating, their imposition is certainly a logical outcome of some outlandish corporate behaviour in the past. In some ways this framework of regulation can lead to a culture of "integrity by compliance", whereby corporate leaders (boards and chief executives) can increasingly feel that if they abide by the letter of the law (or regulation) then they have behaved with integrity.

The subtle shortcoming is that no system can ever describe the limits of obligation that must be self-imposed on the behaviour of men and women of integrity. And, of course, a business culture that assumes that within the regulatory envelope, anything else goes is obviously flawed.

Integrity