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Joseph L. Badaracco Jr's other - Defining Moments, Leading Quietly, and Questions of Character, are insightful, illuminating, and well researched, just as is this one, which is one of his early works.
The author lays the imperative for consistency and coherence between organizational aims, personal values, and individual actions as the founding ground for integrity. The book not only stimulates thinking on very real conflicting issues that have no clear answers but also presents new frameworks against which one can hone one's ability to decipher organizational complications. Especially, when one is striving to make effective and meaningful progress on multiple dimensions.
The work shares incredible insight into the components of each of the three spokes of integrity:
A) Organizational Aims
1. Meritocracy:
- High Calibre talent
- High IQ
- High EQ (Interpersonal skills)
- Desire to excel
2. People have deeply shared sense of company's goals and purpose
- Economic goals
- Strategic reason behind them
- How individual roles contribute to these goals
- Sense of community/family
3. Open & Candid communication even to point of heated emotional debate
- Good information flow
- Not tainted by politics
4. Environment in which subordinates have substantial autonomy
- Ownership builds commitment
- Make decisions closer to problems
- Reduces bureaucracy
5. A desire that high ethical standards pervade the company
- Base of all other above points
- Are personal and reflect leader's attitude, judgement, experience, values
- Honesty, fairness, mutual respect & trust, compassion & sensitivity in exercise of power
B) Personal Values & Believes
1. Strong personal ethics:
- Honesty
- Fairness
- Builds trust and loyalty
2. Positive belief in others:
- In goodwill
- Latent ability
- Enables delegation, culture of learning & listening, reduces bureaucracy
3. Compelling vision for organization:
- Personal, imaginative
- Builds Competitive Advantage
- Determines 'what' type of organization it will become and 'how'
- Guiding compass for decisions (efficient prioritization; Evaluate action consequences)
C) Individual Behavior
1. Direction & Consistency:
- Actions reflect initiative, risk taking, and unswerving commitment to vision's achievement
- (A) & (B) must be translated into action through behavior that will move the company toward the ideal organization, one that is consistent with the leader's personal values in a dilemma dominated world.
The work offers other actionable insights toward effective leadership:
1. Differentiate between internally generated uncertainty (leads to erosion of trust & credibility) and that generated due to external market factors.
2. Clarity about goals and assumptions leads to understanding which builds commitment, which is fundamentally an issue of integrity of purpose, goals, and action.
3. Intellectual strength of a strategy cannot by itself ensure outstanding results. It is execution of the strategy that separates top performers, and better execution follows from demanding performance standards.
4. Managers must understand the market trends and the in-out of their business.
5. Understand the distinction and relation between Process (means) and Substance (desirable end). Process begets process and substance becomes increasingly imperiled. The tendency of a process to dominate substance imperils everything that makes a first class company. When substance and process collide, set example by focusing on clear direct issues of substance. To keep others focused on substance:
a) Reluctance to reorganize
b) Clear responsibilities & goals (when all are responsible, no one really is)
c) Keeping formal systems and structures simple (hierarchy corrupts info flow)
d) More autonomy to line staff (with clear decision guiding values)
e) Elimination of marginal efforts (all meetings, reports, activities, staff that don't contribute to company's strategy and basic values).
6. Know that healthy conflict is about what is right and not about who is right.
7. It's a mistake to think that negotiation and compromise build consensus. Commitment to shared goals and values is the fundamental source of consensus in an organization.
8. Recognize the conflicts between tangible and the intangible (managers must make the intangibles as real as possible to prevent the tyranny of the tangibles):
a) Short term versus long term factors
b) Ethical standards versus corporate performance
c) Corporate values versus competitive pressures
d) Company's social obligation versus financial performance
9. Stand for consistency in purpose and values rather than being rigid in process and rituals.
