For leadership to be exceptional, it must be integrated.
To be integrated means every aspect of something is linked and well-coordinated. For leadership to be exceptional, your thoughts, words, and actions must be in sync and harmonized.
Your actions must be based on your words, which must be based on your thoughts. This is what will make you predictable enough for other people to lead effectively on your behalf when you’re unavailable.
Similarly, the decisions and actions taken in an organization must be based on the same morals, values, and ethics that were originally established to ensure the excellence and consistency of the organization.
Identify Your Values
Morals, values, and ethics are the factors for continuity in leadership and entrepreneurship, the foundation upon which great organizations are built.
Have you identified the morals, values, and ethics to ensure your leadership is integrated? Have they been incorporated into the policies, processes, and procedures to guide decisions and actions in your organization? Have they been embraced by everyone in your organization?
In two decades of consulting with organizations globally, training leaders, and coaching executives on how to remain relative and competitive in these turbulent times, I discovered that not many have woven their morals, values, and ethics into the fabric of their operations. And this is a very costly oversight.
Not too long ago, some auto parts makers were fined $740 million for fixing prices, while some Swiss banks racked up fines and penalties of $5 billion. Meanwhile, our generation is still feeling the crunch from the multi-billion dollar bankruptcies of conglomerates like Lehman Brothers, WorldCom, and Enron.
Since integrated leadership would have enabled these organizations to avoid these calamities, ensuring that the decisions and actions taken within your organization are based on the same values people in your organization consider honorable is the best assurance for profitable growth.
What is Integrated Leadership?
Integrated leadership is the ability to influence your organization with strict moral codes to the extent that decisions and actions are governed by a set of inflexible values and ethical standards. It is when people in your organization are empowered to think, talk, and act based on the same value system.
In the organizations where we have worked with their executives to implement our Integrated Leadership Model in support of their visions, everyone is now a leader, whether they hold a position of authority or not. Everyone is on the same page with regard to what is right, just, fair, timely, and honorable.
This is the power of Integrated leadership.
In my book ‘The Mystique of Leadership‘, I wrote:
“As a leader, some people will doubt your motives and question your beliefs. They will challenge your principles and disregard your opinions. They will neither appreciate your vision nor understand your purpose. But what will clarify who you are, what you believe in, where you are going, and what you stand for is nothing but your morals, values, and ethics. Without these, they have every reason to question your authenticity”.
Morals are your beliefs concerning what is right or wrong. Values are principles used to guide your decisions and actions. And ethics are rules of how things must be done in line with your morals and values.
May you lead at your best, now and always.
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What Makes Integrated Leadership?
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