“Great conversations lead to better relationships, higher performance and, ultimately, future leaders.”
– Lisa Rubinstein
A few weeks ago, I connected with Lisa Rubinstein, CEO of The Institute for Human Potential in Australia and author of True Leadership. We started exchanging ideas and she dared me into a game of blog tennis. Always open for a challenge, I accepted.
Lisa got to serve first and launched immediately a difficult, but crucial topic – a leader’s integrity.
I have learned that integrity can be quite an abstract word to deal with in an organisation. It’s easy to get lost in words. But there is another, more practical way to deal with integrity and I believe Lisa worded it quite nicely: “great conversations lead to better relationships, higher performance and, ultimately, future leaders.”
Our communication style tells us a lot about who we are and what values we put forward. Our communication style also impacts the performance of others. I’m a big fan of coaching – helping others to increase awareness and take responsibility for their actions – a communication style you also mentioned in your post. If you would listen to, and analyse, all conversations that take place in an organisation during a random week, you would have a great integrity indicator.
But knowing that your company might want to improve its integrity by working on the quality of the conversations is not adding much value. So the key question is: “How do you improve integrity? (If that’s possible?)”.
It’s nice to have those fancy words like integrity as a value statement on the wall, but what do you do when nobody cares. Lisa, do you remember the quote: “Do as I say, not as I do”? Too many leaders don’t walk the talk. They say one thing, but show different behavior. What do you do when people know that non-integer behaviour got them – or their boss or CEO – the corner office?
