1. What is Integrity? Beyond “I’ll Know It When I See It”
By Linda Fisher Thornton
During the recent 2014 NeuroLeadership Summit, Jamil Zaki (an Assistant Professor of Psychology at
Stanford) talked about an interesting experiment the Stanford Neuroscience Lab did. The team took a
large number of Fortune 100 statements of company values and generated a word cloud from them to
see which word would appear most often. Which word was it? Integrity was the most frequently used
word. This experiment reveals a general agreement that integrity is important, but what exactly does it
mean? People may understand it in very different ways.
The word integrity evolved from the Latin adjective integer, meaning whole or complete.
[3]
In this
context, integrity is the inner sense of “wholeness” deriving from qualities such as honesty and
consistency of character. As such, one may judge that others “have integrity” to the extent that
they act according to the values, beliefs and principles they claim to hold.
Wikipedia, Definition of Integrity
Following this definition, integrity is the alignment of our thoughts, actions and words with our personal
values. The tricky thing about integrity in organizations is that integrity is partly internal (what we think)
and partly external (what we say and do).
When we demonstrate integrity, what we think, say and do are all aligned. But aligned with what?
I think that something that many organizations include in the concept of “integrity” is good
moral character. People with good character would be morally aware and ethically competent. This leads
me to ask some important questions:

2. Do your leaders know which values you want them to act on when they “Use the highest integrity
in all that they do?”
Do they know what those values look like?
Do they know how to honor them while balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders?
Without clarity about the ethical values we should honor in our work, integrity is individually interpreted,
based on the personal values of each leader. To help them lead ethically at a high level, though, we need
to answer a deeper question – “Which ethical values should we uphold in what we think, say and do?”
Are your leaders crystal clear about which ethical values are most
important to your organization?
If your leaders are all perfectly clear about which high level ethical values to uphold and how to
demonstrate them, you are probably incorporating complexity into your leadership development. You are
also probably providing leaders with the level of detail about ethical values that they need to navigate
through information overload, constant change and demands from multiple stakeholders. If not, you may
be rolling the dice by taking an “I’ll know it when I see it” approach to ethics.
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