Measuring Integrity - or Not
Stephen P. Kelner, Jr., PhD, President of Ascent
Shortly after the banking crisis of 2008, several financial services firms called me to ask: “do you have a way to measure integrity?” Or sometimes, “can you measure honesty?” While understandably reluctant to state their reasons, the news reports provided plenty.
However, that’s not quite what they actually wanted. Instead, they wanted something much simpler: “can you identify a dishonest or unethical person?” Or even just “someone who doesn’t follow the (legally required) rules?” They had paid a large price for people lacking honesty in business dealings, but they didn’t seem to care if the person fought for values, for example refusing to take a requested unethical action, or to stand up for a colleague being pushed out unfairly.
Amazingly, the answer to all these questions is “yes.” But the real question is whether to measure Integrity – and if so, then to what extent.
First, Define Integrity
The answer to this question lies in how we choose to define Integrity. After an intensive study of CEOs in US religious healthcare organizations 30 years ago, in a time of frequent ethical conflicts as religious and nonreligious healthcare institutions merged, I not only developed a measure with my colleagues, but a scale of Integrity, based on how we saw good and great leaders grappling with these issues.
In brief, we define Integrity as acting on one’s values. At the most basic levels, it is about knowing the values, and generally following them; in practice, being honest when asked. At higher levels, it is about acting on values when it would be easier not to, and being honest spontaneously, even if it makes you uncomfortable. The higher the risk for values-based action or honesty, the higher the level – if you put yourself at professional or even personal risk for a principle, you possess a high level of Integrity. Going any higher requires helping one’s organization follow moral principles as well – reinforcing and sometimes even enforcing values as necessary.
How Much Integrity Do You Need?
To answer the original question, we start with a simple fact: for most people, in most roles, simply following the rules and maintaining a standard of honesty is sufficient to do the job well. For those roles, measuring levels of Integrity doesn’t matter, because that’s a normal level of “business morality” – doing your job honestly and appropriately.
When do you need higher levels? When a person in a specific role genuinely faces frequent, challenging, and risky ethical dilemmas, of course. Having said that, the more senior the leader, the more important to act on values, not just espouse them. Executives stand out visibly, especially in these days of social media. If a CEO puts forth a set of beliefs while violating them with their behavior, it corrupts the entire organization – encouraging bad behavior and discouraging employees who might have joined for the company values – and can have a powerful impact on how the world sees the company. The CEO, like it or not, embodies and represents the reputation of the company. Outstanding CEOs know that.
In general, even with CEOs, you just need to know if people lack Integrity or behave dishonestly. You may not need to know whether they righteously put themselves on the line for a principle, but you do need to know they will not violate principles as a matter of course.
While our scale of Integrity is relatively simple, the measurement is not. Who would admit willingly that they are dishonest? Or even if they are generally honest, but might cave under pressure?
How Do You Measure Integrity?
In addition to our scale of positive Integrity, we have five reliable ways to identify the critical concern of a person lacking integrity or honesty, especially when used skillfully and in combination:
· Behavioral interviewing
· Referencing
· Attributional Style of success and failure
· Implicit motivation patterns
· Personality
Each of these requires specific skills and tools, so you see descriptions below, not instruction manuals.
Behavioral Interviewing
Patterns of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings reliably indicate someone who might “bend the rules” or break them. If asked to describe a difficult situation where bending the rules is understandable, such as a conflict, people are more willing to admit doing so. Even then, they may tell the story in a way that makes them look better. Coupling this with references keeps people more honest.
References
We mean not just asking for praise, but doing a behavioral interview of an observer: rather than “what did you do,” you ask, “what did you see him/her/them do?” Detailed observations of rule-breaking or dishonesty provide the best indicators. Ideally, a balanced set of observers not selected by the person gives better data. Of course, if someone selected by the person describes their dishonesty, that can be more compelling. (With friends like these…)
Attributional Style
The causes people attribute to their successes and failures illuminate how they deal with difficult issues. Research has identified three categories: internal/external (self versus other), specific/global (here/everywhere), and unstable/stable (this time/all the time).[i] Successful salespeople attribute failures to external, specific, and unstable causes: “the client doesn’t want to buy this product at this time.” This attributional style enables salespeople to move on to the next client rather than every rejection depressing them. But past research I did with a colleague indicated that managers think about failure somewhat differently. They still see causes as specific and unstable – fully situational – but they don’t blame themselves or others. Instead, they take responsibility for fixing a problem, whether they created it or not. A leader who refuses to ever take responsibility for a failure, or blames everyone else for their own decisions, or never admits failure at all, simply cannot be trusted.
Implicit Motive Patterns
The three key drives we all possess[ii] can push a person to make emotionally-driven decisions rather than rational ones. While not necessarily the strongest indicator of dishonesty or rule-breaking, motives can help us understand what situations might provoke someone to bend the rules or lie. For example, highly Achievement-motivated people focused on getting to a goal may find short-cuts – cheating to reach the goal. Similarly, highly Affiliation-motivated people may try to protect friends and loved ones even if inappropriate. Finally, highly Influence-motivated people worry how they are perceived by the world at large and may try to protect their reputation at any cost.
Personality
Relatively recent research[iii] has identified the “Dark Triad” or an underlying “D Factor” as a key indicator of dishonest, unethical, and manipulative behavior. The latter has been identified as maximizing one’s own desires at the expense of others.[iv] That is, people with these traits or this factor think overly well of themselves, and manipulate others callously (in some cases, even taking pleasure in hurting others[v]) for personal benefit. Extreme versions of this appear to underpin psychopathy. Obviously, honesty and ethics can be irrelevant to a person like this, except insofar as it suits their purposes.
Pulling It Together
In practice, you don’t need to measure degrees of Integrity for most non-executive roles, and even when just focusing on the egregiously dishonest or unethical people you don’t need all five measurement categories; as long as any provide solid data, you might have cause for concern – or at least an explanation for unethical behavior. For example, the classic ethical dilemma of stealing bread to feed one’s starving family is far more understandable – and forgivable – than lying to cast aspersions on another person merely to promote yourself. On the corporate scale, taking ethically gray actions in order to maintain company solvency and thus prevent massive layoffs might come from a similar place.
The tricky part is that people vary in their values and beliefs, but generally someone acting on behalf of their values – whatever they are – is a good starting place to evaluate them for Integrity, which also allows you to test what they really believe.[vi] What values do they choose to defend? Being self-sacrificing automatically takes you out of the Dark Triad, for example.
A second tricky part is that people willing to lie for their own benefit typically know full well that people don’t want to hire habitual liars, which leads them to lie that much more. Hence, a skilled assessor with more than one source of data does a better job seeing through the lies.
It’s not as easy to evaluate Integrity as one would like, but the core principle is clear and distinguishable, and we can both administer and teach the techniques when needed.
For more details and process, drop us a line. We’ll be honest with you.
[i] For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_style
[ii] For a more positive application of the motives: https://ascent.net/blog/2023/7/25/inspiring-through-implicit-motivation
[iii] Paulhus, Delroy L; Williams, Kevin M. (December 2002). "The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy". Journal of Research in Personality. 36 (6): 556–563.
[iv] See, for example, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dark-triad
[v] The “Dark Tetrad” adds sadism to the list of negative traits.
[vi] Even con men and criminals don’t think of themselves as villains: they try to justify their actions by blaming the victim – e.g., had the victim been smarter, they could not have been conned.