[October 25, 2015] Every year, once a year in the 1950s, my family and I watched our black and white television and were thrilled to see the Walt Disney Animation Studio’s movie Pinocchio. I had no idea at the time that the movie was in color and no idea that I was learning a valuable lesson. The lesson that I learned from my mom and dad, as well as from Pinocchio, was that your integrity is worth a whole bunch.
With my children growing up in the 1990s, we were able to watch the movie anytime after purchasing it on VHS video cassette.1 That was also a time when a person’s integrity meant more than anything else they carried in their professional rucksack. Everyone, especially those I associated with in the military, knew that once you lost any degree of integrity that it was nearly impossible to recover … it took effort and lots of time.
Trust comes by foot and leaves by horseback.” – Johan Thorbecke, Dutch Politician
We’ve all seen senior leader careers destroyed by lapses in their integrity. Recently the CEO of the German car manufacturer Volkswagen resigned after it was discovered the company cheated on United States automobile pollution emission standards.2 A leadership failure on such a scale is not uncommon or limited to business. The U.S. military has had its share of problems from cadet cheating scandals at the premier West Point Military Academy to the firing of General officers for lying.
If we put it into financial terms, we can learn from Dr. Fred Kiel who quantified the value of a leader’s integrity in his book Return on Character.3 He found that companies run by CEOs with high integrity were more than four times as profitable and employee engagement greater than others. His research results are clear; companies do best under the direction of high-integrity leaders.4
How much is a leader’s integrity worth? Warren Buffet once commented that we should look for three things in a person: intelligence, energy, and integrity. “If they don’t have the last one, “ he said, “don’t even bother.” For most of us, integrity is everything. I think I’ll watch Pinocchio tonight for old time’s sake.
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- I still own it, so I’ll never sell my VHS player (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS) but the grandkids will be watching it on my Blu-ray player.
- http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/23/martin-winterkorn-resigns-as-volkswagen-ceo.html
- http://www.krw-intl.com/book/return-on-character/
- For a good article that lays this out in better detail, see Dr. Travis Bradberry, coauthor of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, here: https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/10/how-much-is-a-leaders-integrity-worth/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+world-economic-forum-blog+%28Forum%3ABlog%29