High Integrity Leaders:

What Successful Executives See

Mark L. McConkie

Graduate School of Public Affairs

University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

and

R. Wayne Boss

Leeds School of Business

University of Colorado at Boulder

Abstract

This qualitative study reports the findings of fifty-one structured interviews with successful business executives, asking their views on personal and professional integrity. Nine common or shared perceptions emerge, and center in the shared perception that high integrity people believe truth exists and that it is knowable, that high integrity people cultivate multiple virtues, seek goals more noble than profit-making or accomplishing organizational goals, are governed by inner controls such as conscience, and see integrity as “oneness, wholeness,” and not divisible into a public and private self.

Introduction

In the great scholarly and practitioner conversation about good leaders, almost all conversants seemingly point to integrity as a central, if not the central, variable. The focus is far from new: Xenophon's Apology (Strauss, 1970), for instance, begins with Socrates' classic argument that the quality of his long life is his best defense against his accusers, and both the Bible and Plutarch's Lives, classic leadership texts through the centuries, are filled with stories of those who led and triumphed by personifying integrity in what they did. A lengthy tradition of teaching about integrity as a means of leading--and of even successfully surviving--has been one result of this cultural inheritance, so that an important integrity literature for managers and leaders has developed (see, e.g., Erikson, 1950; Taylor, 1985; McFall, 1987; Srivasva, 1988; Walters, 1988; Babaracco & Ellsworth, 1989; Halfon, 1989; Calhoun, 1995), which stretches even to the global level (Benjamin, 1990; Solomon, 1992; Carter, 1996; Paine, 1997; Petrick & Quinn, 1997; LeClair, Ferrell, & Fraedrich, 1998; Westra, 1998). Because we place such a high premium on high integrity, high trust cultures, which are the outgrowth of high integrity, are encouraged, with the promise that they will conduce toward interpersonal (Covey, 1985; 1989) and leadership effectiveness (Fairholm, 1994) as well as help facilitate cooperation (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995; Smith, et. al., 1995) lower costs (Frank, 1988; Jones, 1995), promote smooth and efficient market exchanges (Arrow, 1974; Smith, 1981) and improve organizational ability to adapt to change and complexity (Korsgaard, Schweiger, & Sapienza, 1995; McAllister, 1995). In the leadership literature, written for and by practicing managers and leaders, models are given to enable leaders to gain credibility (Kouzes & Posner, 1993), and take advantage of the fact that people universally are endowed with conscience (Sonnenberg, 1994; Bird, 1996). Integrity and high trust are uniformly placed at the center of interpersonal and executive effectiveness.

Methodology:

What is missing in this discussion is a high resolution photograph of the characteristics which fold together to create the high integrity person. In an effort to begin to paint that picture, we have interviewed fifty executives, some with highly visible careers, some much better described as "unknown personalities," asking about their experience with high integrity people and the standout characteristics which separate such people from the remainder of the workforce. No one was interviewed without first being nominated by three others who identified him or her as a person of high integrity. The interviews, which lasted, on average an hour, began with structured questions, but respondent responses nearly always dictated departing from the structured questions in order to follow-up on ideas suggested. The structured questions were as follows:

1. Could you please define what you mean when you use the word "integrity"?

2. As you think of people who in your experience stand out as having been men or women of high integrity, what are the things which impress you—what did they do which demonstrates high integrity?

3. Can you think of any illustrations where people failed to showcase integrity, and if so, what were the consequences?

4. Is integrity really necessary in order to get good business or organizational results?

5. What, if anything, can we do to cultivate cultures of integrity in the organizations where we work?

Each interview was taped and transcribed into detailed case studies.

Results:

From the interviews conducted, we have begun to sense shared perceptions and expectations with regard to what constitutes a high integrity person. These begin to fold together to create an initial "executive's view" or perception of what integrity is, and what characteristics high integrity people posses. In discussing the data, we have chosen to illustrate the common perceptions with quotations from those interviewed. The general results from the interviews are tabulated and summarized in Table I.

TABLE 1:

Characteristics of High Integrity Leaders Grouped by Employment Sector and Expressed as Percentages of the Total Interview Population (N=51).

Characteristics of High Integrity People

% Private Sector

Responses

% Public Sector Responses

% Not-For-Profit Responses

Total Number of Responses

%of Total

Sample

Recognize and respond to the Promptings of Conscience

68%

Cultivate Multiple Virtues

62%

Possess a Strong Sense of Task Accomplishment

50%

Work for Something Greater than for Profit /Organization Goals: Work for Some “Noble Cause or Purpose”

52%

Recognize that Integrity makes Business or Organ- zational Sense, because:

It builds trust

It increases productivity

52%

40%

Emulate Honorable or Noble Role Models

70%

“Fill their Minds with Truth”

46%

Acknowledge Mistakes When the Make Them

38%

Surround Themselves with

Systems Which Reinforce Integrity

40%

Common Perception Number 1: “High integrity people recognize and respond to the promptings of conscience.”

Most of the interviewees, in one form or another, expressed the belief that the high integrity people they know or had known were men and women who both recognized and responded to the promptings of conscience. This leaves unanswered the entangling questions of where conscience comes from, how it is shaped and molded, whether everyone has conscience, whether it can be numbed or muted, and dozens of other important conceptual questions. It simply assumes that conscience is a unique human endowment, that all men and women, to greater or lesser degree, possess conscience, and that when conscience speaks to the mind, high integrity people act according to the promptings which they receive. This does not assume that high integrity people follow conscience every time it speaks, but it does assume that they do respond on the preponderance of occasions.

An Illustrative Case:

One interviewee, a former United States Senator, provides perspective. He defined integrity as “one, wholeness”—much as does the Oxford English Dictionary, “like a fabric without a blemish, [one] that doesn’t have any holes in it.” This entails “unity of thought,” he said, adding:

Some people have it. Now, my former occupation [as a U. S. Senator] is full of people who have no such need, for whom getting up and making a speech about the need to control Federal spending, let’s say to balance the budget, on Monday, and voting for some big spending program, or even making a speech supporting [big spending] on Tuesday, simply did not trouble them…[Such people] have the capability of being utterly sincere on Monday and utterly sincere on Tuesday, and somehow being utterly blind to the fact that those two sets of actions do not go together. Some of them can even almost weep in support of both causes. I mean, their heart just weeps for the need to control spending, and the next day their heart just breaks for some project that needs to be funded.

I am the opposite. One of the reasons that I am somewhat unusual in the occupation I was in for a long time, is that it never terrified me a bit, or bothered me or caused me a minute’s concern that I might be defeated at the next election. It would have driven me nuts if I voted two different ways on two different days. That would have just kept me awake at night. I would have thought less of myself. I could not have stood it. I have a high need for gestalt [unity; completeness]. I have a high need to be able to plug every wire in my brain into my every other wire. It’s just a difference in the way we are wired up, I guess.

What was the effect of that “unity of thought” and of honoring conscience? “I slept good!” he said [Interview # 1].

This is an instance where over a life time of living in harmony with conscience, it had become natural, even easy, to follow conscience. At emotional levels, however, it was difficult for him to understand how “double-minded” others could violate conscience. For his part, he was motivated by a desire to be at peace with conscience. Indeed, peace of conscience was more important to him than being re-elected or even of having the approval of his constituents. His sense of self was rooted in the concept of living in harmony with conscience. It was, in short, one of the governing forces in his life—and he recognized it.

At the same time, he was not so governed by political values (and differences) that he could not see integrity in those who differed with him. U. S. Senator Robert Bird, for example, he described as almost always seeing things in a different light: “much of the twelve years I was in the Senate we (i.e. Bird and himself) were just on opposite sides on issues time after time, and yet I never particularly felt he was simply catering to the special interests that dominate the party. I thought that on almost all occasion he was doing what he sincerely thought was right, even though I thought he was way off base a lot of times” [Interview # 1]. In short, having integrity has more to do with living in harmony with conscience than in subscribing to a particular creed or set of political values, even when the political values are at the core of what one believes.

A Second (and Negative) Illustrative Case:

A second illustration of how conscience shapes conduct, and therefore defines integrity, comes from a young executive who recalled an experience he had as a soldier during the Persian Gulf War. In this instance, he made a choice he later come to regret, but from which he learned a great deal. We identify him by the pseudonym of Bill.

Bill was a non-commissioned Officer, assigned to an Armored Cavalry Regiment. He had received some limited First Aid training prior to arriving in the Gulf, but was not a medical person. On the second day of the ground war his Regiment was assigned to cut off a back door retreat of the Iraqi Army. At one point, they surprised some ill-equipped and retreating Iraqi’s, whom the Americans mistakenly thought were attacking. It was “pretty much a turkey-shoot,” said Bill; “the American forces pretty much mowed them down, and I don’t know if any were captured, or if they were all killed or what exactly happened.” The following morning, driving through that same battlefield was, in Bill’s words “very gruesome.” There were dead bodies strewn all over the desert. “We literally had to swerve to miss body parts sometimes during that stretch of desert.” The American troop movement was slowed by occasional stops on the road, which included soldiers getting off trucks and out of tanks to look around, to ensure no enemy were hiding in bunkers or other lurking spots: “we had to get out and basically make sure that we were protected. It was very tense, because a lot of the Iraqi’s there were not dead, and it was just real gruesome….”

Bill’s own words best describe what happened: “…at some point we stopped and there was a seriously wounded Iraqi soldier who was thirty yards from me….He got up off the ground, slowly, weakly, shot through the stomach badly, and had some other wound I think too. Of course, that could have been blood from his own belly wounds. He looked like something that is beyond words to describe, and he was trying to slowly walk toward me with whatever strength he had. [He was] not threatening. He did not even have a weapon that I saw. I did not perceive any threat whatsoever. I perceived someone who wanted help and desperately needed help and was wounded badly. As he was coming towards me…I thought ‘well, gosh, I could help this person. I might be able to bandage his wounds, inject him with some pain killers, or something like that to help this guy until someone comes along.’ The whole thing didn’t last more than ten seconds.”

“I remember getting out of the truck, looking around, and all of a sudden I saw this person, who stood up and started coming toward me, and just at that point the radio squawked and said ‘Move out. Move forward, we’re moving,’ or something along those lines. So I got in the truck and we drove off, but I radioed in the co-ordinates and said, ‘There’s a live enemy, a seriously wounded enemy soldier, but he is alive and in need of medical assistance.’ By pushing the ‘save’ button on the satellite GST System I had saved the position, so that later on when I was back in the area looking for lost equipment and what not, I kept looking around to see if I would find him dead.”

Did Bill make the right decision? “No!” he said emphatically. And how did he know? “My conscience bothered me. That was exactly it. My conscience bothered me! That’s why I kept thinking about it, and why I went back to see if someone had picked him up. It was conscience that made me make that radio call, but that was only after I ignored conscience the first time.”

So penetrating were the emotional scars from that experience, that Bill promised himself he would never betray his conscience like that again. In short, the emotional pain from the experience became his teacher—and he vowed never to return to that tutelage. He also noted that just a few days before the interview in which he shared the experience, he had encountered on the highway a car still flaming from an accident, in which several people were burned. “There is nothing like a smell to revive a memory,” he said, “and it reminded me of the whole Desert Storm thing all over again, and how important it is to follow conscience.” Observing that he could not change the past, the memory of the bleeding Iraqi soldier served to remind him “over and over” that “it is easier to do it right [i.e. follow conscience] the first time [Interview # 2].

In both of these illustrative cases, following the prompting of conscience was the standard against which the two people measured integrity, in one instance, peace of mind came from following conscience, and in the second, discomfort and discontent followed the failure to observe conscience. In sum, high integrity people both recognize and respond to the promptings of conscience.

Common Perception Number 2: “High integrity people cultivate multiple virtues, each supportive of the other.”

No virtue stands alone. Each virtue or trait has strength and force only insofar as it is attached to other virtues or strengths. Similarly, one virtue reinforces another. For example, it takes courage to be honest, it requires humility to be teachable, and it takes patience to be kind. Again, the concept is not new. The Stoics and Epicureans of ancient Rome, for example, reasoned the same case, and in so doing were only repeating the arguments of the Greek Aristotelians who had preceded them. The interviewees in this study uniformly saw the same phenomenon. A sampling of their comments illustrates:

[From the Chairman of the Board for an International Consulting Firm, and a highly celebrated author:] (High integrity people) are usually people that have humility, that recognize that they are not God, that there is a God, and that there is something bigger and larger than themselves. They are also people that have a lot of courage, because they usually have to act contrary to social mores and social norms, and following the conscience which God has given them. So I see integrity as essentially the child of humility, and of courage. I think it is also the parent of what I call ‘the abundance mentality,’ or the ability to see all of life as having plenty out there and to spare, and to never get into a comparison or competitive mindset, where they are not genuinely happy for the success of other people. I think it is also the father of wisdom, so that you see things in correct perspective” [Interview # 3].

[From the CEO of a large, International Consulting Firm:] (Integrity) requires the ability to …actually think “What will I accomplish if I do this, versus that?” Now, I don’t mean that you have to take ten minutes, but you have to take a little bit of time. In highly charged situations the temptation is to respond quickly, when there’s a lot of energy in the room. It takes a lot of discipline to not respond quickly… [Interview # 4].

[From the President of a $200,000,000 plus per year Construction Company:] Our Mission Statement says: “Construction with Integrity.” …It requires workmanship, craftsmanship, loyalty to your fellow employees, high quality filing systems to keep your records. All those things. How can we expect our carpenters to do find woodwork, crown mold, chair rail, door trim—to do beautiful, almost artistic woodwork if they’re standing in six inches of dirt and debris from sawdust to soap-up cans? The housekeeping that we insist on in our projects is a passion. It’s the same thing with safety. How can we expect people to do fine quality work if they are working in unsafe conditions? So that’s part of our integrity as well. [Interview # 5].

[From a Senior Executive in the music industry:] We had a wonderful learning from one of the now wealthiest men in the industry. Early, when he was really strapped—I mean desperately in need of money—he said no to a deal which would have made a lot of cash but which also would have violated values he holds dear. He was almost starving, and yet he said no. It takes courage to have integrity at a time like that. [Interview # 7].

These four examples are reflective of the larger sample of interviewees. In almost every instance, interviewees recognized an interrelationship between the multiple virtues which fold together to create integrity. That is, integrity is not really one virtue, but the congealing of many virtues in order to create one unified, harmonious whole. One interviewee, an attorney and Law Firm Partner, thus defined integrity in these terms: “[When I think of integrity] I think of the phrase, an integrated circuit. That means all the parts come together, and fit snugly and tightly together, and so that circuit works because of all the component parts working together…” [Interview # 6].

Just as multiple virtues combine to create the person with integrity, multiple vices combine to create the low integrity, or dishonest person. The above noted attorney illustrates by telling of working on a case with an attorney from another firm. They agreed to work together, thus coupling their different skills. They also agreed on a financial split. Soon, however, his co-counsel saw a way to increase his share of the winnings, and followed his greed; he then lied about his motive and his conduct. In addition, he broke the established rules of legal procedure, dismissing his violations as “necessary, and then refused to disclose information until compelled by the Bench to do so, thus making the case very difficult to litigate” [Interview # 6].

While the recognition that multiple virtues fold together to create high integrity people may be neither new nor surprising, it is significant that people in the working world, struggling with the problems of getting things done in the organizations in which they work, so uniformly recognize, from their own intuition and training, that the phenomenon exists. It begins to suggest that the “universality of the recognition argues the universality of the concept.”

Common Perception # 3: High Integrity People Possess a Strong Sense of Task Accomplishment

Because integrity lies in what we do, and not simply in what we say, high integrity people have a strong sense of commitment to task or of getting the job done. In the words of the former Surgeon General of the Air Force, “it is an internal ability to be honest whether someone else is watching or not…” [Interview # 49]. Indeed, in every instance interviewees identified the source of their commitment to task as important and in turn they could neither be true to self, to their employers, or to their employees unless they worked hard and did thorough work. For them, it was a moral issue: “I expect my employees to give me an honest day’s labor for an honest day’s pay,” said one executive, “and I expect them to do it just because it is the right thing to do, not because they signed on the dotted line” [Interview # 47]. The moral equation is quite simple: “How can I be honest,” said another interviewee, “if I promise to do the job, andthen don’t? If I waster time at the water cooler, or in idle chat, I am cheating my employer. Some such idle chat is important to build relationships with the people you work with, but it is also important not to waste company time. Didn’t Ben Franklin or someone say that wasting time is cheating your employer?” [Interview # 51].

Integrity, however, is not just a matter of putting in one’s time; in addition, it has to do with the way we work. One Construction Company President explained that his company has a slogan, or motto, which summaries everything they do: “Construction with integrity.” To him, that slogan has mission statement impact, and means that they must do a great number of different things to support and sustain the central core value of integrity. He gives an illustration:

…Years ago I learned that going to conventions didn’t cost money; going to these conferences of best practices never costs us money. We always brought back ideas that saved money. I remember sitting in a conference and getting an idea that immediately saved us $20,000. How many trips to the Las Vegas Convention Center can you take for $20,000? We’ll spend more this year [on conference attendance], but we will also do $10,000,000 worth of concrete work. All we’ve got to do is affect the cost of that by .2% to pay the bills. Learning best practices represents the implementation of our value of trying to build buildings of integrity [Interview # 5].

For this man, the quest for integrity was the quest for excellence, and it included the process of doing everything they did was well as they knew how to do it. For that matter, giving an ho