Spokes of a bicycle wheel

If you have ever ridden a bicycle, you would understand that to ride it everything about the bicycle would need to have what is known as integrity. In other words, no part of the bicycle, especially the wheels, should have any missing spokes or the brake pads worn or have any missing parts.  It is whole. Otherwise, the riding experience would be horrible.

If integrity is what makes a bicycle work, where does it play in leadership or at your profession? Well, in everything. If you're hearing integrity for the first time, it's obvious that you might not be working with integrity in what you do.  You might be getting your job done but what does the resulting efforts produce? Do you experience questions about your work or acknowledgement of good work done? Just like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, if integrity is missing in your work, you'll likely have to either rework it, get a failing grade or a poor performance review.

So what is integrity?  To be clear, it's doing what you say you will do and doing what people expect you to do even the unsaid. It's also doing what you know to do. Let's take the example of being a leader of an organization and one of your primary jobs is to build relationships with people and represent your organization at functions.  If what you say is that you'll be at functions building relationships with other organization, then with integrity, you will be there at those functions building relationships. On the other hand, no one is saying you need to be there, but people are expecting you to be there, right? Then with integrity, you will be there.

When things don't work
When things don't work, you can look at integrity as a foundation. Look to see if there was an action you could have taken - a so-called missing.  Could you have had a conversation with a key player in your project? Did a goverment filing get filed? Did your homework get done? Did you forget to ask someone to help you?

In summary, if you look, you can always find a missing.   When you do find that missing, put it in. What you'll find many times is that that piece could make all the difference in what you're up to.


Regards,
Gil Gido
NAAAP Seattle
President

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidewalk_flying/3533042414/