My grandparents believed you were either honest or you weren't. There was no in-between.
They had a simple motto hanging on their living-room wall:
"Life is like a field of newly fallen snow;
where I choose to walk every step will show." They didn't have to talk about it
—they demonstrated the motto by the way they lived.
They understood instinctively that integrity means having a personal standard
of morality and ethics that does not sell out to expediency and that is not relative
to the situation at hand. Integrity is an inner standard for judging your behavior.
Unfortunately, integrity is in short supply today—and getting scarcer.
But it is the real bottom line in every area of society. And it is something
we must demand of ourselves.
A good test for this value is to look at what I call the Integrity Triad,
which consists of three key principles:
Stand firmly for your convictions in the face of personal pressure.
There's a story told about a surgical nurse's first day on the medical team
at a well-known hospital. She was responsible for ensuring that all instruments
and materials were accounted for during an abdominal operation.
The nurse said to the surgeon, "You've only removed 11 sponges,
and we used 12. We need to find the last one."
"I removed them all," the doctor declared. "We'll close now."
"You can't do that, sir," objected the rookie nurse, "Think of the patient."
Smiling, the surgeon lifted his foot and showed the nurse the 12th sponge.
"You'll do just fine in this or any other hospital," he told her.
When you know you are right, you can't back down.
Always give others credit that is rightfully theirs. Don't be afraid of those
who might have a better idea or who might even be smarter than you are.
David Ogilvy, founder of the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather,
made this point clear to his newly appointed office heads by sending
each a Russian nesting doll with five progressively smaller figures inside.
His message was contained in the smallest doll: "If each of us hires people who are
smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people
who are bigger than we are, Ogilvy & Mather will become a company of giants." And that
is precisely what the company became—one of the largest and most respected advertising
organizations in the world.Be honest and open about what you really are. People who lack
genuine core values rely on external factors—their looks or status—in order to feel
good about themselves. Inevitably they will do everything they can to preserve this facade,
but they will do very little to develop their inner value and personal growth.
So be yourself. Don't engage in a personal cover-up of areas that are unpleasing in your life.
When it's tough, do it tough. In other words, face reality and be adult in your responses to
life's challenges.Self-respect and a clear conscience are powerful components of integrity
and are the basis for enriching your relationships with others.
Integrity means you do what you do because it's right and not just fashionable or politically
correct. A life of principle, of not succumbing to the seductive sirens of an easy morality,
will always win the day. It will take you forward into the 21st century without having to
check your tracks in a rearview mirror. My grandparents taught me that.