1.3 “Integrity is the essence of everything successful.”
By Jim Reger and David Irvine
GUEST COMMENTATORS
Working with organizational cultures, the single most common request we get is how to build more trust and respect in the workplace. It is our experience that this is achieved through personal accountability—the ability to be counted on—which is the basis for personal integrity. Personal integrity leads to self-respect, respect for others who demonstrate integrity, and ultimately a respectful workplace. So in our view, personal integrity is the essence of building a successful culture of trust and respect.
As an engineer and inventor, Buckminster Fuller understood the importance of strength within a design. Engineers are accountable for designing structures capable of handling conditions up to a certain limit. In the engineering world, the margin between safety and disaster is known as “structural integrity.” Similarly, our success as accountable people depends on our personal structural integrity. As the engineers of our own existence, our choices affect not only our own lives but also the lives of the people who rely on us.
By standing behind our promises and assuming a position of accountability, we begin to design a life of personal structural integrity. With this integrity as our foundation, our work and service in our families, organizations, and communities will be rock solid. However, just as you could never design and build a structure to handle any condition, personal structural integrity will always have its limits. Because integrity is not rigid, but instead strong and flexible and adaptable to life’s changing circumstances, personal structural integrity can meet almost any test.
Integrity comes from the word “integer,” which means wholeness, integration, and completeness. Being integrated is a necessary condition for self-respect, and self-respect is the basis for creating a respectful environment. Integrity means having clear, explicit principles and doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s about being honest with yourself and others. Integrity is deeply personal and, therefore, deeply applicable to all areas of life.
Integrity has everything to do with your success as a leader. Leadership—the capacity to elicit the commitment of others—is about presence, not position. Now more than ever, power, purpose, and privilege no longer reside at the top of an organization; they potentially live at every level. Great leadership cannot be reduced to techniques or tools or titles. While you may be promoted to being a boss, you don’t get promoted to being a leader.
You have to earn the right to be called a leader. Great leadership comes from the identity and integrity of the leader. Authentic leadership is achieved through the power of presence, which comes from being an integrated human being, a person of integrity. Integrity is, indeed, the essence of everything successful.
DAVID IRVINE and JIM REGER co-founded the Newport Institute for Authentic Living, whose focus is on building authentic and accountable cultures of trust and respect that inspire and unleash greatness. They have co-authored two books on authentic leadership: The Authentic Leader, It’s About PRESENCE, Not Position, and Bridges of Trust, Making Accountability Authentic.
DAVID IRVINE is one of Canada’s most respected voices on leadership and organizational culture and his work has contributed to the building of accountable, vital, and engaged organizations across North America. David can be reached at: www.davidirvine.com.
JIM REGER’S passion and commitment for facilitating powerful and effective change is evident in his work, which is focused on assisting entrepreneurial leaders in creating and building authentic lives and cultures. Jim can be reached at: www.regergroup.com.
Bucky was so certain that integrity was the key to everything, that he named his beloved sailing schooner (the one seemingly extravagant material possession that he allowed himself) Integrity. He also made certain that his personal integrity was intact regardless of what other people thought or believed.
Bucky’s definition of integrity is structural. Anything that has integrity holds its shape regardless of external circumstances. Success demands such a rigorous accountability. First, one must determine her or his “shape.”
You need to know who you are, to have core values and to work at maintaining your internal and external integrity as much as possible. Then, like Bucky, you will have a life that you experience as genuinely successful.
You will also find yourself living your dream, making numerous contributions to others and feeling genuinely fulfilled. You will also find your “shape”/integrity challenged by external conditions and other people. Success will require that you do your best to maintain your shape just as Bucky and all the great teachers and leaders have done and are continuing to do.
And your success may not look like others would have it. You may be perfectly content living a simple, sustainable life rather than pursuing the “American Dream.” You may appreciate walking and using public transportation rather than owning an automobile. And you may prefer spending your time with family and friends rather than chasing after the next big career promotion.
We all have to make such life decisions, but they are easier when you come from the context of maintaining your personal integrity—knowing that you are “holding your shape.” Then, success is something that you choose rather than something that is imposed upon you by society, governments, parents, friends, or corporations.
1.4 “Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me ‘Trim Tab.’”
By Werner Erhard
GUEST COMMENTATOR
What Bucky says here stands out for me because Bucky’s words speak powerfully to something basic in all of us—the desire to make a difference, to have our lives matter. Bucky refused to be limited by the conventional wisdom that there is nothing one little individual can do to make a big difference. This notion led to a resignation that became a frame for living for many people. Yet Bucky came to see that in fact each person is capable of making a profound difference in their own life and in the lives of others. He saw and spoke that the individual, any individual, has the power to take a stand, and live from the stand that who they are and what they do can make a difference, and that by doing so they become a trim tab literally capable of turning the ship of life.
Thanks to his grandson, Jaime Snyder (who had taken the est Training), I had the opportunity to meet Bucky. At the time, Jaime was 20, I was 40, and Bucky was 80—Bucky liked the symmetry. As Bucky and I got to know each other, I heard what could inspire people. We invited Bucky to meet