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INTEGRITY: GUT-LEVELETHICS
Contributed by Layton Fisher and inspired by Gay Hendricks and Kate Ludeman.Integrity and its cousin, ethical behavior, are at the core of long-term successful leadership.
Personal integrity, particularly of leaders, is the source and foundation of organizational
integrity and ethics. This tool takes the cerebral concept of ethics and places it where you can
understand and act on it—at gut level.
Think back to a gathering of some type, a meeting or even a dinner with friends, a time
when you noticed something in your body telling you, “Something isn’t right here!” You feel
tension rise within you. You lose your sense of ease and ability to act spontaneously. A ques-
tion of integrity has surfaced. Someone’s opinion or behavior is hard for you to accept.
Integrity boils down to:
✔ being authentic with yourself,
✔ being authentic with others, and
✔ doing what you say you will do.BEING AUTHENTIC WITH YOURSELF AS A LEADER
You will respect yourself more when your feelings and your actions are in alignment or con-
gruent. Biologically, the human brain is set up such that external stimuli come first through
the primordial limbic brain. Put simply, things are feltbefore they are relayed to the thinking
center of the brain and brought into consciousness. To better understand your feelings, tune
into your body’s signals—dry throat, shoulder tension, or a lump in your stomach—any of
which may be trying to tell you that something is out of whack here.
➠ First, you sense an emotion such as fear, anger, or sadness.
➠ Second, you need to name the emotion, to acknowledge the emotion to yourself: ”I’m
angry,” “I’m scared,” or “I’m sad.” This is necessary because, although feelings live in
the body, dealing with them requires that you bring them into consciousness.
➠ Third, to act on your feeling, it’s necessary to think about what might have triggered
or caused this feeling. For example, “I’m apprehensive right now because I hear us
agreeing to an action I believe to be at odds with our policy. This could cause our
employees to lose trust in us.”The right opening to speak up can sometimes pass quickly in organizations, and people
often regret their silence and having missed the opportunity to lead. Stay connected to your
feelings; acting with integrity creates a powerful model for others to trust their own feelings
and speak their own truths.
BEING AUTHENTIC WITH OTHERS AS A LEADER
This means there’s congruence between what you say and how you act (the audio matches the
video). Are there distortions, untruths, or omissions in your communications with others: Big
36 SECTION 1 FOUNDATIONALCONCEPTS