Monday Morning Motivation: Five Steps to Energize Your Team, Customers, and Profits
:- The love of the truth. A key ingredient to establishing and maintaining your integrity is to discover and then face the real truth – not just what you hope to be the truth, but the absolute reality of your situation. Our nature is to be selective with the truth and cling to the things that are pleasant to us.
- Courage to stand up and speak out for what you believe. To stand up for your beliefs, you have to know what you stand for. Your integrity begins when you speak out about what you believe. What are your core values? What’s so important that it will never be compromised for any reason?
- Persevere in your pursuit of fairness. In a grey area, err on the side of fairness. What you do is being closely watched by your team, and their judgments are based on their perception of what they observe. It may not be fair, but you have to manage your people’s perceptions – not all decisions are black or white. Err on the side of your team. Swallowing your pride is a small price to pay to retain or gain their trust in you.
- Live what you teach. Talking about integrity is easy. In fact, in Enron’s 2001 annual report, integrity was listed as one of its most important corporate values – along with communication, respect, and excellence. It seems sort of silly now, but Enron’s leaders probably spent thousands of hours identifying which values to list. The list does not mean anything – the way they ran their company meant everything.
- Continually ask, “What is the right thing to do?”
