I’ve written about the Right Person, Right Role, Right Stage model with hiring. Then how Right Person was a cascading gate model of Integrity, Ability, Standards and then Reliability. Now to dive into the Integrity gate.
It’s easy to view integrity as a multiplayer concept. The way a person’s integrity, or lack thereof, impacts other people. Undoubtedly it does have external impacts. But those are second and subsequent order consequences. I have come to see that integrity is first and foremost an individual construct. Warren Bennis, the founding father of leadership as an academic discipline, has by far the best writing on this. He characterises integrity as being integrated, with oneself. That the different parts of oneself live and function in alignment. To know thyself. If a person doesn’t know themself, then how can anyone else reasonably be expected to?
The outputs of integrity are trust and predictability. That a person does what they say they will do. It is then about whether that integrated person clicks with the social architecture of your organisation (another Bennis concept that he uses in place of culture, preferring social architecture as it more optimistically lends itself to changeability. This is a whole other post in itself). Whether you share the requisite values (again a whole other post).
I’ve come to see Integrity in a Right Person sense as having two components: Objective Integirty and Subjective Integrity. Objective being whether that person is integrated in themself. This being a pre-requisite to whether it’s relevant to even bother assessing Subjective Integrity. As if Objective Integrity isn’t there, you have no basis for doing so. Subjective Integrity is then about whether that personally integrated person is capable of being successfully integrated into your organisation.
A heuristic I’ve found useful when it comes to the Subjective Integrity judgement: asking myself how I’d feel if I had to work with that person for the rest of my life. Almost certainly I won’t. But if the prospect of doing so fills me with dread, that is an indicator that I’m at risk of rationalising a key deficit in integrity which will inevitably bite at some point down the line.
I’ll move onto the Ability element of Right Person in the next post.