One of the first qualities to develop to become a good leader is integrity. When this quality guides your actions, you inspire trust among your team members and adopt a responsible leadership approach. It’s a great first step toward ensuring your success and that of your team.
According to the definition of integrity provided by the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales in France, it is described as “the character or quality of a person who is incorruptible, whose conduct and actions are irreproachable.”
This definition may feel a bit intense, but it provides an aspirational goal and a guiding principle for daily decision-making. The aim isn’t to become perfect but to ensure that our decisions are rooted in moral and ethical principles.
“Look for three things in a person: intelligence, energy, and integrity. If they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two.”
– Warren Buffett, Businessman
This quote speaks volumes about the importance of integrity in every sphere of life. If someone with a track record as impressive as Warren Buffett places integrity as the foremost quality to seek in collaborators, it’s worth taking a few moments to understand why integrity sits at the top of his list.
Integrity enables:
- Building trust-based relationships
- Gaining credibility
- Improving your reputation
- Allowing leaders to stay aligned with their values
- Ensuring ethical decision-making
- Fostering a positive environment
- Increasing resilience
- Strengthening conflict management approaches
- Empowering leaders to promote accountability
As evident from the above list, many essential aspects of management are influenced by being a person of integrity. This makes it clear why Warren Buffett identifies integrity as the most crucial quality to look for in colleagues, superiors, or team members.
Building Trust-Based Relationships
To become a good leader in your workplace or community, those you influence must trust you. If people perceive you as a person of integrity, they will also view you as honest and reliable.
Your collaborators will know they can confide in you, and you will safeguard sensitive and personal information rather than using it as leverage to trap them later.
As a person of integrity, you won’t show favoritism and will treat every member of your team fairly. This impartial approach strengthens trust even further.
While it’s natural to have collaborators you prefer working with (this is human nature), maintaining a neutral attitude and keeping your preferences private will help you preserve the trust of others.
This trust becomes a powerful lever for communicating your expectations and transferring responsibilities to your employees, who will be more inclined to follow your lead in achieving shared goals.
Gaining Credibility
When those around you know you are a person of integrity, they recognize your consistency between words and actions. A person of integrity says what they do and does what they say.
This trait will greatly assist you in managing changes you may want to implement within your team. Typically, people are hesitant to change their ways because stepping out of their comfort zone is daunting. They fear the unknown outcomes of new actions, which is why they often stick to old habits, even when they know it’s not the best way to achieve goals.
When you approach them with new ideas, being perceived as reliable, honest, and credible will help alleviate their fears and positively influence their opinions about the new methodology.
This will save you significant time and effort.
Improving Your Reputation
Let go of the desire to be liked by everyone—it’s impossible and unnecessary. A person of integrity doesn’t automatically side with the majority just to avoid conflict. Instead, they make decisions based on what is right rather than what is convenient or popular. A person of integrity listens to their inner voice, which allows them to remain at peace with their choices and positions.
Sometimes, the majority may be wrong…
Or you may be wrong…
Regardless of who is right or wrong, an integrity-driven approach based on moral and ethical principles will positively strengthen your reputation.
An example from my time as a warehouse manager illustrates this point. During my first conversation with a new employee, he admitted he was apprehensive because I had a reputation for being “by the book.” He even thought I would reject his vacation requests, even if his supervisor approved them.
Wow!
Was I a monster?
Where did this negative perception come from?
Though I had never spoken to this person before, he had already recognized my rigorous management style, which actually pleased me. While I was happy that my reputation preceded me, I took a moment to explain my approach and reassure him of my fair, supportive intentions, combined with my expectations of responsible and ethical behavior.
It was essential to correct his misunderstanding of my management style to earn his trust and ensure a positive collaboration.
Rigor does not mean rigidity.
Staying Aligned with Your Values
What happens when your actions don’t align with your values?
You might feel uneasy, struggle to sleep or eat, lose motivation, or worry that everyone around you sees your inconsistency.
Adopting an integrity-driven approach minimizes or eliminates these undesirable symptoms. Acting with integrity also soothes your mind, as your actions align with your values and principles. This alignment brings inner peace and a deep sense of satisfaction regarding how you pursue your goals.
A recent experience of mine serves as an example. I was invited to join a business development group. Throughout the presentation about their approach to achieving financial freedom, I felt uneasy, even queasy, at the thought of following their suggested path to relieve my financial burdens. Although the approach was entirely legal and ethical, it didn’t align with my values or principles, so I declined. Instant relief!
A side note: I had also feared disappointing the person recruiting me and resisting his insistence.
Unnecessary stress—none of this happened.
I occasionally forget, despite telling everyone around me, that I am the captain of my destiny and decide what is best for myself, my family, my career, and my life.
Ensuring Ethical Decision-Making
As a leader or manager, especially in mid-level roles like supervisor or manager, you’ll face external pressures from both superiors and employees. In challenging situations or to avoid financial losses, others might ask you to bend certain rules to serve personal or short-term interests, sometimes at the expense of ethics.
It’s vital to resist these temptations or threats and maintain a clear moral direction.
You are ultimately responsible for the actions of your team members, and regardless of external pressures, you must own the approach taken.
To minimize conflicts, take the time to explain to stakeholders why you cannot deviate from your decision. This transparency, combined with your willingness to assume responsibility of your decisions, will reinforce the ethical foundation of your choices.
Fostering a Positive Environment
Who doesn’t enjoy interacting in a positive environment, whether in personal or professional settings?
Building a team where integrity is a core value allows each member to clearly understand expectations. The leader is transparent about their intentions and the objectives to be achieved.
When integrity is a fundamental team value, toxic behaviors such as dishonesty, favoritism, and abuse of power are minimized, if not eliminated. This reduces employee stress, increases well-being, and strengthens their engagement with the organization.
As an advocate of compassionate leadership, possessing a quality that helps make your team members happy and positive should be highly motivating.
A good leader can also influence their team to embrace an integrity-based approach, which boosts transparency, mutual respect, and collaboration—ultimately improving team morale and productivity.
All of these factors contribute to the creation of a positive environment.
Enhancing Resilience
As previously mentioned, adopting an integrity-driven stance can be challenging when facing external pressures.
Your confidence in your convictions and approach when confronting such challenges will require you to draw on your reserves of resilience.
It’s tough to paddle against the current, and you may feel tempted to change your decisions to ease the weight on your shoulders or the headwinds you’re facing.
Trust yourself!
If you believe you’ve made the right decision, don’t deviate from your path under any circumstances.
Once you’ve weathered the first wave and adapted to the pressure, moving forward will become easier.
Ensuring a Stronger Approach to Conflict Management
As a manager or team leader, you’ll inevitably face conflicts within your team.
It’s essential to take the time to listen to all parties involved before determining the best way to resolve the issue.
As a person of integrity, those involved will know that you won’t show favoritism. Your decisions will be based on facts rather than biased interpretations influenced by personal opinions of those involved.
This will make gathering information and gaining acceptance for your final decision much easier.
Promoting a Sense of Responsibility as a Leader
Integrity fosters accountability at all levels. Employees who act with integrity take responsibility for their actions and mistakes, encouraging a culture of transparency and development.
A leader surrounded by responsible collaborators faces less pressure and is better positioned to distribute the workload across the team effectively.
The following sections of this article will provide examples drawn from my professional experiences. The first highlights an integrity-driven approach that aligns with the leader’s values, while the second describes a more challenging situation involving multiple teams, leading to an imperfect outcome.
Integrity in the Workplace
During my time managing a warehouse, a few weeks before annual performance reviews, we received the company’s evaluation criteria, which included sections on technical skills (know-how) and interpersonal behavior (soft skills).
In all my meetings with the teams to prepare for the evaluations—held at least 3-4 months in advance—I made it clear that I placed more importance on soft skills than technical skills.
A key point I emphasized was that even if an employee was the best forklift operator with the highest efficiency, if their behavior was unacceptable and they treated their teammates poorly, their evaluation would reflect this negatively, and so would their salary increase.
Weeks passed, and reminders to difficult employees didn’t seem to change their behavior. When it came time for evaluations, these employees received poor feedback on their performance due to their behavior. For the most part, they were indifferent, as they felt evaluations didn’t carry much weight.
That changed when I informed them they would receive below-average raises—or in one case, no raise at all. At that moment, the message was clear. Despite the protests of employees who felt slighted, the outcome was that I simply followed through on what I had promised. I acted with integrity, coupled with a certain amount of managerial courage.
This approach may sound intense, and it wasn’t an easy situation to manage, but the long-term impact on high-performing employees—the ones who keep the ship afloat—was significant. When actions align with words, employees know they must respect the manager’s framework and expectations, or there will be consequences.
This isn’t about instilling fear but rather about holding employees accountable. A compassionate manager remains present to support and provide the tools necessary to complete tasks but must also address behaviors that don’t align with the company’s expectations.
The Other Side of the Coin
Another example that demonstrates the opposite outcome occurred during my time as a production supervisor. The health and safety team at the workplace (SST) had provided a guide outlining the sanctions for employees who violated safety rules. I spent 30-60 minutes with small groups of employees—nearly six hours in total—explaining the company’s expectations and the consequences of noncompliance.
A few days later, a mechanic brought me a bypass key that had been left on a machine. This key allowed the machine to continue operating during maintenance or repairs. The mechanic handed me the key and asked, “Who’s going to get suspended?”
Since the employee responsible worked a different shift and the mechanics weren’t under my direct supervision, I wasn’t the one to handle the situation. However, when I handed the key to my manager the following day, I pointed out that if we adhered to the safety charter, the responsible employee should be suspended. My team expected this outcome.
Unfortunately, the employee was neither suspended nor sanctioned. When I relayed this to my team, while reiterating that such behavior on their part would be addressed, the same mechanic told me, “There’s now a precedent—no sanctions can be given.”
I was deeply disappointed when I discussed the matter with the manager involved. We had missed the chance to demonstrate consistency with our directives, losing both credibility and an opportunity to reinforce the importance of integrity.
Do you see the difference between these two situations and their long-term effects on team cohesion and managerial credibility?
Conclusion ~ Warren Buffett
To close the loop on integrity, this chapter ends as it began: with words from Warren Buffett, as quoted in Les Affaires magazine on December 9, 2022.
Warren Buffett famously told employees of Salomon Brothers when he took over the company in 1991:
“Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of its reputation, and I will be ruthless.”
He later suggested the following guide for making tough decisions:
“If you’d be comfortable having your actions published on the front page of a newspaper where your family and friends would read them, then go ahead without hesitation.”
Discover the 5 Must-Ask Questions for Happy Teams
Do you want to better understand what motivates your team members and could help you create a happy team? My practical guide, 5 Must-Ask Questions for Happy Teams, is designed to provide you with simple and effective tools to:
- Create a climate of trust within your team
- Identify the true needs and aspirations of your employees
- Encourage meaningful conversations that foster collaboration
- Boost engagement and collective performance
- Anticipate and resolve challenges before they become obstacles
Carl-Michael Tessier
Coach in high-performance team development and tailor-made support
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