(excerpted from Cultivating an Unshakable
Character)
For a leader, honesty and
integrity are absolutely essential to survival. A lot of
business people don't realize how closely they're being watched
by their subordinates. Remember when you were a kid in grammar
school, how you used to sit there staring at your teacher all
day? By the end of the school year,
you could do a perfect imitation of all your teacher's
mannerisms. You were aware of the slightest nuances in your
teacher's voice - all the little clues that distinguished levels
of meaning, that told you the difference between bluff and "now
I mean business".
And you were able to do that
after eight or nine months of observation. Suppose you had five
or 10 years. Do you think there would have been anything about
your teacher you didn't know?
Now fast forward and use that
analogy as a manager. Do you think there's anything your people
don't know about you right this minute? If you haven't been
totally aboveboard and honest with them, do you really think
you've gotten away with it? Not too likely. But if you've been
led to believe that you've gotten away with it, there might be a
good probability that people are afraid of you, and that's a
problem in its own right.
But there is another side of this
coin. In any organization, people want to believe in their
leaders. If you give them reason to trust you, they're not going
to go looking for reasons to think otherwise, and they'll be
just as perceptive about your positive qualities as they are
about the negative ones.
A situation that happened some
years ago at a company in the Midwest illustrates this
perfectly. The wife of a new employee experienced complications
in the delivery of a baby. There was a medical bill of more than
$10,000, and the health insurance company didn't want to cover
it. The employee hadn't been on the payroll long enough, the
pregnancy was a preexisting condition, etc,etc,..
In any case, the employee was
desperate. He approached the company CEO and asked him to talk
to the insurance people. The CEO agreed, and the next thing the
employee knew, the bill was gone and the charges were rescinded.
Then he told some colleagues about the way the CEO had so
readily used his influence with the insurance company, they just
shook their heads and smiled. The CEO had paid the bill out of
his own pocket, and everybody knew it, no matter how quietly it
had been done.
Now an act of dishonesty can't be
hidden either, and it will instantly undermine the authority of
a leader. But an act of integrity and kindness like the example
above is just as obvious to all concerned. When you're in a
leadership position, you have the choice of how you will be
seen, but you Will be seen one way or the other, make no mistake
about it.
One of the most challenging areas
of leadership is your family. Leadership of a family demands
even higher standards of honesty and integrity, and the stakes
are higher too. You can replace disgruntled employees and start
over. You can even get a new job for yourself, if it comes to
that. But your family can't be shuffled like a deck of cards. If
you haven't noticed, kids are great moral philosophers,
especially as they get into adolescence. They're determined to
discover and expose any kind of hypocrisy, phoniness, or lack of
integrity on the part of authority figures, and if we're
parents, that means us. It's frightening how unforgiving kids
can be about this, but it really isn't a conscious decision on
their part; it's just a necessary phase of growing up.
They're testing everything,
especially their parents.
As a person of integrity
yourself, you'll find it easy to teach integrity to your kids,
and they in turn will find it easy to accept you as a teacher.
This is a great opportunity and also a supreme responsibility,
because kids simply must be taught to tell the truth: to mean
what they say and to say what they mean.
"Praise is one the world's most
effective teaching and leadership tools. Criticism and blame,
even if deserved, are counter productive unless all other
approaches have failed."
Now for the other side of the
equation, we all know people who have gotten ahead as a result
of dishonest or unethical behavior. When you're a kid, you might
naively think that never happens, but when you get older, you
realize that it does. Then you think you've really wised up. But
that's not the real end of it. When you get older, you see the
long-term consequences of dishonest gain, and you realize that
in the end it doesn't pay.
"Hope of dishonest gain is the
beginning of loss". I don't think that old saying refers to loss
of money. I think it actually means loss of self-respect. You
can have all the material things in the world, but if you've
lost respect for yourself, what do you really have? The only way
to ever attain success and enjoy it is to achieve it honestly
with pride in what you've done.
This isn't just a sermon, it's
very practical advice. Not only can you take it to heart - you
can take it to the bank.
To
Your Success,
Jim Rohn
This
article was submitted by Jim Rohn, America's Foremost Business
Philosopher. To subscribe to the Free Jim Rohn Weekly E-zine go
to
www.jimrohn.com
Copyright (c) Jim Rohn
International. All rights reserved worldwide.
