Startup Founders, Do You Even Know What Integrity Is?
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Why you should implement a popular core value that is routinely ignored in practice.
The next time someone asks you to do something and you drop everything and do it, to the general disquiet or actual disapproval of your team’s or your own mental health, I want you to ask yourself, “Am I out of integrity?” Only then, after you’ve answered the question honestly and to your satisfaction, should you make your decision to do it or not.
Integrity is one of the most-often cited core values, but I wonder how much founders truly understand what it means?
When I see a founder who expresses frustration, anger, exhaustion or overwhelm with regards to their employees, I often see somebody who is behaving in a manner which conscious leadership defines as “out of integrity.” Conscious leadership defines acting in integrity as taking responsibilities for our feelings and speaking the truth. Those who operate in integrity feel an energetic wholeness that comes from feeling in sync with their thoughts and emotions. More often than not, their teams will feed off this positive energy, which creates a virtuous circle of honesty and positivity, even when disagreements are on the table.
Of course, the opposite also happens: a founder who is out of integrity will infect his or her entire team, creating a vicious circle of finger pointing and frustration. The truth is actually fairly simple: if your team isn’t honoring their commitments and agreements with you and each other, they’re probably following your lead.
I’ve experienced being both in and out of integrity, and let me tell you being in it feels a whole lot better. But it takes work, starting with knowing the things that typically block integrity. As The Conscious Leadership Group has taught me, there are four major blockages that cut off this energy to us much as a dead bulb on a string of lights disrupts the flow of energy to the other lights. These blockages include:
Responsibilities we don’t own.
Feelings we don’t feel.
Truths we don’t say.
Agreements we don’t keep.
I’ll bet the next time you find yourself involved in some kind of company drama that saps your energy, it can be traced to one of these blockages. To return to our example above, the founder who is always willing to drop everything is out of integrity because he or she is not prioritizing what’s most important for the business. Or, he or she may be dishonoring their own rhythm, need for sleep, need for exercise or for family time.
Our hypothetical/real founder may be overcommitting and thus fall into the habit of breaking commitments and agreements, which is something I see all the time. Founders can truly be the world’s greatest breaker of agreements because they excel at telling themselves stories that they are so busy and so right about what is best for their businesses. When something comes up that seems more important than what they said they would do, they will do that something without a second thought.
Except that the new thing they’re doing is usually not that important after all, while doing it throws the rest of their team out of whack and, just maybe, undermines their trust in the leader. That’s being out of integrity.
I also see founders who are often late for meetings, which they explain by telling themselves stories about their own importance and ability to know an emergency when it pops up. And so they are late, and this sets a tone for the whole company who are likely to begin thinking, “Hey, I’m pretty busy, too, so I’ll play fast and loose with schedules and deadlines.” This behavior then drives the founder crazy — how ironic.
I would challenge founders to set the tone for staying in integrity, which requires setting clear agreements with yourself and how you are going to behave. You can read more about this here.
And then, set clear agreements with your team by setting up a corporate calendar rhythm for the whole year. Creating this kind of meeting rhythm will enable you to set clear expectations for meeting start times and for determining the all-important who is doing what and by when — the foundation for successful agreements. Utilizing a tool like Asana or Monday.com allows you to assign responsibility and delegate, which in turn helps you drive integrity across the day to day agreements you depend on to run the company.
I would submit that once the founder takes responsibility for his or her own integrity and sets the integrity tone for the company, magical things happen. Suddenly, there’s plenty of energy to go around. Suddenly, the joy and the creativity that fills the individual founder also fills the company. And suddenly, all those little fires that used to pop up everywhere, with emergency after emergency that the founder would be chasing down, all start to disappear.
Of course, founders will always face genuine emergencies that will require them to renegotiate their agreements with members of their team. But this should be the exception rather than the rule. Check out this excellent video on renegotiation of agreements.
So, give it a go. Get yourself in integrity over the next couple quarters or so and let me know how it is helping your organization enjoy new levels of energy and creativity.
Sincerely,
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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!