LEADERSHIP Series: Leaders Integrate Ethics into Leading

The root meaning of integrity is wholeness – we get our word integer from it – a whole number. The Hebrew meaning of the word used here for “integrity” has in its root the word completeness and includes the concepts of ethical straightness and perfection.

Greenleaf (The Servant as Leader) points out that authenticity is at the core of the leader – especially the servant leader – “….begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.” Not a manufactured feeling. A natural one. Authentic.

We want our leaders to speak without dissimulation. We expect clarity – wholeness – in pointing a direction. That kind of authenticity flows from an “upright” heart – one whose ethics are based on a dynamic relationship with his/her Creator: it is the “heart” of a leader to which people respond. That’s why Greenleaf posits that the servant-leader must be “naturally” inclined to serve.

Proverbs 11:3a (NKJV) The integrity of the upright will guide them…

Our job as leaders is to plumb the depths of authenticity in our followers. We must ask the kind of questions about a result that connects thought and the action. Our ethic demands that what we say matches what we do. We are responsible to model and behave with compassion. To listen with understanding. To empathize without necessarily accepting inappropriate behaviors or performance below standards.

Just as we cannot create a new primary color, so we cannot change a universal truth (see C. S. Lewis, Abolition of Man) that there are certain things that are really true and really false – an ethic – and it is from this that we derive our source of values that includes respect for the individual. Without that respect, a leader cannot really guide. They lack integrity and will not have committed followers.

What’s your ethical base? Do you lead out of power-of-position or poverty-of-self? Do you know it all or are you learning?

Are you whole?


Copyright ©2009 by P. Griffith Lindell