Honesty and Integrity - My perspective

This week I was having an interesting assessment of the kind of managers employees like, with one of my colleague. Dimensions such as thought leadership, technical knowhow, fun-loving, approachability, counselling skills, giving freedom in decision making etc are very important. These are the levers through which mcan connect with the team. However, more often I encountered problems in two areas - Honesty and Integrity.
Let me first explore Honesty. Honesty can some times equated to truthfulness and sometimes it is also equated transparancy. Suppose, you as a Manager has to make a hard decision on an employee, how often, we have given heads up to that employee. One of my colleague told me that, the organization requested him to relocate to a different city for a two month project (of course as project managers we sometime hope that the projects do get extended). This information was not shared with him, the better part of the story is that he got to know that he is not on the project through client and not from the Manager. Whatever may be the business reasons, the Manager was definitely not honest with the employee in this incident. Another thing, we believe many employees do understand that they are given opportunities and so on. In reality that is again not true. In most cases, I as a Manager had to sit with the employee at the beginning of the assignment to set expectations. A honest expectation setting discussion definitely helps in such situations, rather than giving a surprise at the end of the assignment.

Integrity talks about fairplay and unbiasedness. Integrity deals with consistency and using the same yardstick to measure all the employees. I had a project manager as a colleague in my previous company. He was biased to a specific part of India. It made it extremely difficult to work together. Integrity should be visible to the employees. Many a times honesty and integrity go together because honesty helps the manager to show the visibility of integrity. But both are not the same.

You all know that i like blocks. I tried put again things in the blocks and see what type of managers preferred over others.

Needless to say if you as a manager high on honest and integrity, then results are best. Though one thing i learned, being honest with employees who are not open to feedback could be tricky. Managers need to be careful from that perspective. As an employee i would love to have a manager in this segment. At least, my last three managers were in this block. It does not matter whether i liked their style of working or not, but I am better off overall because i got managers in this quarter.

If you are in the second quarter - Low on honesty and high on integrity, it might still work for you. All employees would like fairplay more than honesty. Sometimes brutal honesty may backfire. I have seen many managers in this quarter, and employees love this manager equally well. These managers are typically very nice to employees (if you are honest, you cannot be nice all the time) and you know that you get fair deal.

High on Honesty and Low on Integrity is a bracket you never want to be in as a manager or employee. More often than not, you would shoot yourself on your feet. Have not really come across many people with this combination. The best example i heard was, a manager had employees both within his project and outside and a honest admission that he needs to take care of his employees inside the project than people reporting to him outside the project. I would put this manager in this category.

Low on Honesty and Integrity: Have seen many managers in this segment. The best person i know was my first PhD guide. At the beginning of the semister he told me that complete all the courses and then let us start the research. When i finished my courses and went back to him, he said he never told that to me and he also said the i can find alternative guide. But he was hell bent on throwing me out of the institute. Luckily there were more honest and integriy people in the academic circles and they fought for me and i finished my degree with ease. In the process i met the best manager in the life (my new PhD guide) and learnt everything about honesty and integrity through him.

My advice to both employees and managers is simple, be honest and have very high intergrity. You will be a winner in the long run. Career is not about what you achieve at that point in time, it is about where you go in the long run and what footprints you leave on the way. These two dimensions take you miles in your career. On a lighter note, i missed a meeting recently because i overslept. I could have given 100 reasons, but simply said i overslept.. after all we are humans. No one really killed me!!!!!