Nobody Believes You: Why Having Integrity is Important S5 EP4

In the fourth episode of Season 5, Jenni discusses the critical importance of integrity for leaders. Drawing from research and practical experiences, Jenni defines integrity as consistently keeping your word, being genuine, and behaving ethically. 

She shares insights on the challenges of accountability and the consequences of lacking integrity, emphasising the need for leaders to take responsibility and follow through on promises. Through a previous case study, Jenni illustrates how a failure to demonstrate integrity impacts team trust and engagement. She also provides actionable steps to build integrity, including embracing accountability, learning to apologise, and prioritising commitments.

Episode Timestamps:

We all want to believe that we have it, but a lot of leaders that I work with aren’t demonstrating it with their team and it’s always an uncomfortable conversation because, when we talk about integrity we’re talking about someone’s ability to keep their word. – Jenni Field

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

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Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about the importance of integrity when it comes to being a credible leader. Now, integrity is the most important practice for both leaders and followers in the research that I did. It was consistent in that research between the two groups. It’s also the practice that most people refer to when you ask them about credibility. When I asked people to define it on my LinkedIn community, links to integrity were incredibly important. 

But what is integrity? 

Well, I define leaders with integrity as those who know how to do what they say they will do. They consistently follow through with actions aligned to their words. They are genuine, accountable, and they behave ethically in the workplace as well as in the world outside the office doors. They own up to their mistakes when things go wrong instead of making excuses or blaming others. To have integrity is to know who you are, to be comfortable with accountability and to keep your word. 

Now, nearly every leader I work with wants to believe they have integrity. It’s one of those behaviours that people hold themselves to hold themselves to with absolute pride. We all want to believe that we have it but a lot of leaders that I work with aren’t demonstrating it with their team and it’s always an uncomfortable conversation because when we talk about integrity we’re talking about someone’s ability to keep their word.

Now, to have integrity is to be comfortable with accountability. So, we have to look at why accountability can be hard and what we can do to get comfortable with owning our decisions and our mistakes. Now, I’ve recorded a previous episode on accountability so I’ll pop a link in the show notes to that as well. 

But taking responsibility for our actions is sometimes hugely uncomfortable, and this is partly because we just aren’t very good at admitting when we’ve made mistakes. In fact, our brains will do whatever they can to justify actions so we feel better about our decisions. 

But when we have done something we need to be accountable for, and that’s maybe been damaging, or it’s a decision that hasn’t gone well, it takes a huge amount of vulnerability and courage to really step forward and own it. And accountability is hard because we just don’t like holding people to account. It’s just uncomfortable. It’s not a space that we want to step into. 

We’re also quite scared that our decision or our opinion will be wrong and it will offend someone, and we want to be liked and we want to be included and that stops us from doing that. 

And we’ve also put things in place as society to distance ourselves from decisions. We’ve created brands and icons and organisations and teams and all of them remove the individual accountability. Whenever I’m doing any kind of accountability work with teams, trying to get people to put a name down for someone who is responsible or accountable rather than a team is always really challenging. 

But integrity is more than just accountability. It’s about keeping your word and being genuine and keeping your word and accountability generally go very much hand in hand.

You know, to keep your word, you have to make sure that you know yourself well enough to know what you can and can’t do. That’s really important. Otherwise, you’re going to over promise and under deliver. You have to know what’s urgent, what’s important, to be able to allocate.

Time to the right places. You have to know that there’s this power dynamic. You have to be aware of that as a leader and make sure that your decisions and actions are impacting people in the right way. And you also have to make time. If you’re leading a team, you have to make time for people in your day, your week, your month, your year, and all of those things. 

Now, I’ve been very clear that authenticity is a misdirection for leaders, but when we look at the practice of integrity, genuine falls within that, and for followers, feeling that their leader is genuine is really important.

Now, you might argue that authentic and genuine are the same thing. There is a slight difference, and it’s important I think when it comes to leadership. So, being authentic implies being fully trustworthy as according to fact.

That’s kind of the dictionary definition. Whereas genuine means being actually and exactly what is claimed. And that’s the slight difference for me, and being genuine is something that people can connect with. It’s quite a different feeling to just being authentic, and it’s not so easily weaponised, which I touched on in the first episode of this season. 

So we talk about people being genuine as part of their integrity. But the overall challenge with integrity for leaders is that everybody thinks that they have it, and unfortunately that’s not always the case.

What’s the chaos that happens if you don’t have integrity?

Well without integrity there is no trust and we see this time and time again and it’s because people just don’t believe that you will do what you say you will do. They’ve had some experience of that, and that leads them to a place of distrusting you. If I give you an example of Craig, who I was working with, he really thought he had integrity. And when I told him that he didn’t, he was very genuinely hurt. And no one likes to be told that they’re not good at something. No one likes to be told they don’t have integrity. It’s a very powerful word. And understandably, Craig didn’t really appreciate that conversation. 

But when Craig founded his business, he did it with a real sense of purpose. He wanted to help others be the best they could be. He had expertise in his field. He was very knowledgeable. He knew he could build a community. All of those things were important. 

But as the organisation that he’d set up grew and the team grew with that, his expertise had taught him everything about how to do the job. He had the skills to do that. He was very capable. But he didn’t necessarily have the skills to lead the team. 

And unfortunately, what happened for Craig was that one of the team very quickly and abruptly quit after a team meeting. It was a huge surprise to Craig. They had no idea there was anything wrong. But unfortunately, for this team member, there had been several team meetings where things had been promised and not delivered. And they just had enough. They’d just seen it too many times that Craig just didn’t follow through on what he said.

And even though there had been some conversations, by this point, the team member just walked away. And this was a real outcome of Craig’s inability to keep his word. You know, he didn’t feel genuine to the team. He wasn’t being accountable for the things he’d said in the past. And as a result, people just didn’t follow him, didn’t believe him, and therefore didn’t follow him. 

Now, when we see things like this in the workplace, there are lots of elements to it that create that kind of end result of somebody just leaving. For Craig, this was where his team didn’t feel that he was going to follow through. If someone’s lacking accountability, they might see that as though there’s some broken promises. People might start to be quite disengaged and frustrated. It’s an extreme reaction for someone to leave. But if you’ve been kind of putting up with that for quite some time, then ultimately, you’re going to make that decision to end that relationship. And that’s what the team member did.

But how do we build integrity? 

Well, when I was working with Craig, we spent some time discussing integrity and what was getting in the way of following through on the things that were promised. Now, for Craig, some of this linked into some really deeper challenges, which meant we needed to get some additional support from some other experts.

But really, what we’re looking at is why you’re not able to keep your word. What are the other things that we can look at that will help you be able to have some of those difficult conversations? We’ve talked about accountability. We’ve talked about that being quite difficult, quite challenging, quite an uncomfortable space. 

1. Get comfortable with productive disagreement. 

And that’s one of the three things that I would talk about when it comes to building your integrity. You have to be able to disagree with people and have genuine conversations, holding others to account as well as yourself and being okay with that. It’s not going to be nice. It’s not going to be necessarily an enjoyable experience, but we have to be comfortable with being able to have some of those genuine, productively disagreeing conversations. 

2. Learn how to say sorry

Now, this isn’t easy for leaders. It can be really difficult to do. But if you can own your mistakes and be accountable and share why things can’t happen or haven’t happened, then the team will see that integrity shine through because you’re able to say, “You know, I can’t do what I’ve said I’m going to do, but this is why. And I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” It’s that ownership of the outcomes linked to the things that you’ve said.

3. Prioritising the right things

It’s really easy to get stuck being busy, but we have to be intentional with our time and make sure that we’re doing the things that we’ve said we’re going to do, not other things that are taking us away from them.

I hear this a lot from people in organisations. They’re very busy doing things. They’re not necessarily doing the things that have been asked of them. And that makes it very difficult for people to see them as having any integrity. Because they’re not doing the things that they’ve said they’re going to do. And no one can really tell you why they haven’t done that. 

So, simply to demonstrate integrity, you have to do what you’ve said you’re going to do. There aren’t really any corners to cut. If you can’t do those things, you have to explain them and you have to be very clear about why they didn’t happen and what the impact of that is. If you don’t do that, then people just won’t trust you. And trust is a huge challenge for organisations around the world.

So, even if it might feel like it’s something very small, it’s the small things that can often really chip away over time and really create quite a significant issue. As we saw with Craig, with the team member who just walked away, that was probably just a combination of lots of little things for them that had happened. And it was just enough. 

So, even if you think it’s a very small thing, remember that for people that follow you when you lead, sometimes those small things are much, much bigger. 

Thank you for listening!

Now, if you’d like to find out more about the research or take our online Credibility Gap Assessment or find out more about the book, then you can access all that information in the link in the show notes. In the next episode, I’m going to be looking at the practice of likability, what it means, why it’s important to be a credible leader and how to build it.

Thank you for listening. And if you haven’t already, please do join my community by subscribing to my mailing list, and all of the details are in the show notes.