Earlier in my previous blog, we talked about the integral role of Integrity in your decision making process of whether you join or don’t join a company.
Today, I want to dig deeper into the integrity question.
Should the private life of the owner and decision making team of the company you are considering to join matter to you?
100%.
When lack of integrity and immorality is involved in the private life of an owner or in the private lives of the ownership / leadership team, it damages the integrity of your business, and poses a direct threat to your success and reputation.
It is common to find owners who hail integrity on stage to hide their lack of purity off stage. I call them integrity breachers.
I’ve stumbled into many integrity breachers in my 14 years in the industry.
They are more common than you think.
One integrity breacher owner, I caught was one who preached about integrity and being truthful while privately being unfaithful to his wife! Can you imagine?
I caught another integrity breacher who hailed integrity but turned a blind eye to corruption and the infidelity of his key producing leaders despite complaints from the field.
And another who behind closed doors shared a different vision for his company than what he lead the field to believe.
I’ve caught so many incredible breaches of integrity who claim that they do not offer recruiting deals to high level leaders only to find out that they actually do.
I’ve also found breaches of integrity that pride themselves to be a straight-laced company but then behind the curtain, they allow a certain inner group of leaders to bend company policy and procedures.
There are so many ways to break and bend company compliance polices, like moving people around, making insertions, allowing internal cross-recruiting, etc.
More than often owners allow these types of compliance breaches to cater to a particular leader’s wishes and keep him or her from quitting.
I’ve also found integrity breachers who compulsively exaggerate and outright lie about the current state of affairs in a company and mislead an entire audience into joining on false pretenses and promises.
Here is your biggest threat:
One integrity breach and the crack in the damn begins to break wide open that eventually floods to destroy your opportunity.
Let me tell you, this industry promotes you or exposes you, and that includes the ownership and executive decision makers.
If an owner or executive lies, overhypes, misleads or manipulates, over time they lose the confidence of its constituents. One breach exposed, and there will be a question mark behind everything they say.
It’s so easy to displace the trust of the field. Luring people in on false pretenses doesn’t build a healthy organization with clear and reasonable expectations.
That’s why it’s so important that the owners and executive team deliver to a standard of “Underpromising and Overdelivering” and commit to do what they say they are going to do especially when it’s difficult.
When integrity permeates the owner, it also permeates the whole organization and directly dictates who you attract, and impacts your retention rates and team growth.
So if you want to build a company long-term and bless the lives of countless people, you have to be a part of an organization that understands what’s on the line when it comes to “doing the right thing”.
Because when you find the Right owners who do the Right thing, your team and leaders are more likely to stick around.
And you will spare yourself from the pain of having to re-build and from the disappointment of turning your business into a revolving door of people who leave as quickly as they come as soon as they discover that the boss is a breacher.
So the key question for today is:
12. Is your boss a breacher?
Till next time,
Charles,
co-authored with Maral “Dr Yess” Yessayan, PHD
P.S. You can always find me by following me on social media: FB here or YouTube here
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