Integrity is the Main Ingredient to Good Leadership Skills

Good leadership skills and integrity go hand in hand; however, don't mistake the true meaning of integrity with just being honest! Integrity goes much deeper than just honesty! Integrity is the way someone lives their life and their core values!

Let's take a simple but good example of how true integrity works!

Let's say that you are a Christian and strongly believe that a blessing should be said before every meal! At home you always take the time to give a well deserved blessing to God for the meal. However, at a restaurant you are too embarrassed to do so.

Let's give an example that may be experienced in a business setting.

You have an employee that you believe is well deserving of recognition for the hard work they have been putting in. You go to your boss and suggest that this employee be rewarded for that hard work in the form of a monetary gift. To your complete surprise your boss tells you that he is not going to support any reward for a female employee. Will it take integrity to stand up against your boss?

Good leadership skills are often mistaken for producing good or great results. Make no mistake that productivity is extremely important but it doesn't mean that you exhibited good leadership skills to achieve it. I can compromise my values and achieve great results anytime and anywhere! The problem is that those results will be short lived if I don't add integrity to the formula. Not honesty, but integrity!

In business we hear the term integrity thrown around all the time and try to attach it to many things, but few actually have integrity!

The recent banking crisis should have proven to all of us that integrity sometimes takes a back seat to trying to get ahead! The problem is that if they had applied integrity to the way they did business they would have probably made just as much and still be making it instead of driving our economy into the dirt.

We all tell a lie from time to time and this is not about proclaiming that we all have to be perfect! However, we must live our lives by a set of principles that guide us! If we stick to those principles we have a better chance of being successful as leaders. The best lie detector there is would be a group of employees watching their boss. If the boss so much as burps the entire department will know about it!