Enable Integrity
Each of us likes to believe we have integrity. Many of us do. But how does an organization ensure that its corporate culture recognizes, supports, and enables high integrity? When hidden leaders demonstrate integrity, they provide an opportunity for everyone to demonstrate and support integrity, too. By knowing integrity when you see it demonstrated by these leaders, you can determine the best ways to personally support it. You can also determine how well your company culture supports it and use specific tactics to enable integrity throughout the culture.
HOW DO YOU RECOGNIZE INTEGRITY?
When a hidden leader demonstrates integrity, she courageously and consistently adheres to a strong ethical code. Whenever one meets a hidden leader, the integrity is obvious in the leader’s conversations, suggestions, responses, and actions. While hidden leaders display integrity in all their activities, sometimes much of their work is done in solitude or within a small group. This can make it difficult for those uninvolved in the team to see the leader’s integrity in action.
The challenge for managers is observing visible evidence of integrity when the hidden leader is not in the immediate vicinity. In many cases, the manager must watch and listen for this evidence in the comments, responses, and actions of others—those who depend on hidden leaders in the organization and know the leaders’ integrity can be depended on in the toughest situations.
For example, Scott was helping a boutique training firm develop and implement a cohesive strategy, part of which was a new training program created by the firm’s owners. They were very proud of it and planned to make it their keystone product.
A number of the employees in the firm had privately confided in Scott that they felt the program, as designed, could not deliver on its promise. In their opinions, it did not address the learning objectives and performance outcome it promised. These employees were concerned that clients would not be happy with the result.
At a meeting to discuss the program’s launch, most employees of the firm, including the ones who had confided in Scott, feigned praise or said nothing. They were concerned that the owners would not take their criticisms well.
One client representative, Susan, was the only person to take a hidden-leader approach. Courageously, she pointed out that from her perspective as a client representative, the program was not in the best interests of the company’s clients because it would not produce the improved business results the firm touted.
Just as the rest of the employees suspected, the owners of the firm did not respond well. They began to argue hotly with Susan that she didn’t know what she was talking about and they had done a lot of research and careful development to make the program work. In spite of these arguments, Susan maintained her position, citing examples of client issues that supported her argument.
Susan’s courage and integrity in making an unpopular argument for the sake of the customer galvanized others in the room. Other employees rose to defend Susan’s points and share their own criticisms. The owners became quiet and ultimately listened. Faced with the overwhelming anecdotal evidence that the program needed more work, the owners agreed to revamp the program before launching it.
Susan’s ability to stand up for what she felt was right—making an unpopular argument for the sake of the customer—led to a better product and ultimately more satisfied clients. Being a hidden leader was not easy for her, but in the end she gained the respect of her peers and senior management and ensured that customers got a better result. She also changed the beliefs of many in the company about acceptable ways to disagree with the company’s founders and still collaborate to create a productive end result.
While the owners of this company were slow to heed Susan’s leadership, the support garnered from others finally enabled them to see its value. The redesigned program, once launched, was successfully adopted by many of the organization’s current clients and a significant number of new ones. Careful observation and listening in situations like these can point to hidden leaders in an organization. Following are a few examples of situations where we believe hidden leaders can be discovered through the comments, actions, and recommendations of others.
Because hidden leaders demonstrate integrity, others trust that those leaders will meet their commitments. In the business world, this makes hidden leaders a dependable resource when deadlines are tight or situations are difficult. Because hidden leaders also have the courage to act, they can be counted on to help solve problems. Some of those problems may be outside of the leaders’ immediate areas of responsibility.
When a manager hears employees suggest solutions that consistently include asking for help from a specific individual, that individual may be a hidden leader known to everyone on the front line. For example, suppose a team is overloaded and needs to offload a specific task or decision, or find a way to get more resources for the job. When those teams consistently point to one person not on the team who can help address the issue, investigate that person as a potential hidden leader.
Because of the leader’s integrity, team members know they can depend on this person to get a task done, ask management for resources, or tell the team the truth about other options for handling those tasks. For example, Laurie was facilitating a strategy session with a number of frontline supervisors and lower-level managers who were asked to develop a competency-training plan for a new sales force. One of the managers proposed that a large group of skills was necessary before a salesperson could even begin to speak with customers. The group hesitated but generally concurred.
Another manager pointed out that training newly hired salespeople to succeed would be expensive and time consuming. In light of recent market challenges, it would negate the company’s products’ competitive advantages. After a short silence, one of the supervisors took an alternate stand. She proposed that with only a few of those skills, a newly hired salesperson could at least go out on sales calls and shadow an experienced salesperson to learn more about how to interact with customers. In that way, the new person could potentially contribute to the sale and would learn critical skills quickly. Further, if new salespeople were then offered a group of simpler products to sell, with shorter sales cycles, they could practice critical skills in less competitive arenas. At the same time, they could continue their training to build more complex skills.
The hidden leader in this situation—the supervisor with the alternate plan—listened to everyone’s points of view, proposed a solution that did not negate the need for highly trained salespeople, and enabled the company to bring new hires along faster. She presented her ideas freely, although the final proposal in front of the group came from someone higher in her organization. Her courage to speak up enabled the group to address a challenge effectively.
Many decisions in organizations do not entail clear or obvious choices. That’s why such decisions are important and difficult. Someone must judge or weigh the alternatives to identify the best result for the largest number of people and the goals of the organization.
Most decisions offer a range of possibilities, including options that blur distinctions between right and wrong or best and worst. These ambiguous situations make many people uncomfortable. Evaluating a situation and identifying the critical elements before beginning the decision-making process requires a clear sense of one’s own ethical code. It also requires an ability to acknowledge and accept the unknowns related to the decision. These unknowns create ambiguity, a lack of certainty that, to some, makes these decisions tantamount to flipping a coin.
In our experience, hidden leaders manage this ambiguity well, both personally and professionally. For example, pressed by deadlines but without full knowledge of a customer’s needs, a team was struggling with how to proceed. One faction wanted to stop the project until all information could be obtained; another felt that some kind of progress had to be made now. A hidden leader on the team suggested identifying what was already determined and presenting that by the deadline while approaching the customer for more information to be included in a later version.
Hidden leaders may not make the right decisions every time, but they are able to make decisions, a trait that in high-level executives is a signal of future success. Doing something—anything—achieves results faster than trying to eliminate ambiguity with facts, research, or knowledge. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter points out, perfection is unattainable anyway.1 Hidden leaders know this. They depend on their integrity to help them bridge the gap between knowledge and ambiguity.
When a manager hears a group suggesting that a specific individual would have good advice for an ambiguous decision, that person is worth viewing as a hidden leader. The leader’s integrity means that the situation will be considered carefully. The hidden leader will give an honest opinion about what is important to know and what can be ignored. Because hidden leaders are secure in their ethical codes, they can manage ambiguity. They know they are doing their best, and they trust their ethics to carry them over potentially dangerous ground.
Hidden leaders with visible integrity think about more than their own needs and concerns. Because they adhere to a strong code of ethics, they think about the impact of actions on others. Faced with the opportunity to help, hidden leaders choose to support others’ development, careers, and decisions that improve the situation for the largest number of people.
These hidden leaders are often the ones others suggest newly hired employees talk to about working successfully within the company. When people struggle with their positions and want a third-party opinion of their skills, they often go to these hidden leaders for advice. Employees caught in a spiral of conflict with a group or individual also often ask these leaders for help. They may ask about how they can successfully handle others’ anger issues, power struggles, or apparent destructive behaviors. In all of these situations, hidden leaders are seen as appropriate resources because everyone knows they will tell the truth, even if it isn’t what the person seeking advice really wants to hear. They know the leader will be fair and will couch negative feedback in a way that makes it easy to accept and work with. They also know that the hidden leader will strive to maintain an over-arching view that fairly considers everyone’s needs in the situation.
Those without this strong sense of fairness and integrity may appear to be helpful, but they might work behind the scenes to derail others’ achievements or progress in a career or project. These are the secret tellers, backbiters, and problem originators in an organization. They are often described as having hidden agendas or motivations for their actions. They are looking out for themselves. Most people in the organization know who these people are, but others may be blinded by personal relationships or a lack of awareness or exposure. A wide-ranging evaluation of people who seem to have integrity to some, but are mistrusted by others, may uncover the discrepancies.
When people feel the support of hidden leaders, on the other hand, they trust those leaders fully. Managers will hear about recommendations made by a specific person, or notice individuals asking that person’s advice on how to advance in the organization or improve skills and abilities. That person is the hidden leader who is open about helping everyone progress, for the benefit of each person, the organization, and the leader as well.
Early business organizations were structured by function. Few employees crossed the lines between functions to work with or interact with others. Today, that structural bias has changed. Innovative companies create cross-functional teams to develop products, organize systems, and solve problems. New structural systems are emerging that are flatter, meaning people with very different skills work together and have the same positional influence. Whether an organization has chosen to eliminate levels of management or several firms are working together virtually for short-term projects, more and more employees must work across functional boundaries and gain the respect of people in other fields and specialties.
For some people, this transition is difficult. Many people don’t bother to understand others’ work challenges and contributions and tend to think of their own functions as the sole anchors of a company’s achievements. But as you know, every function contributes to the success of an organization. Building bridges between functions so people understand how and what each one contributes is a major challenge. These bridges can mean the difference between reacting and innovating.
Hidden leaders naturally cross these functional boundaries, both in person and by reputation, because their integrity assumes that everyone is working toward the success of the company. They project their integrity on others. When they work with other functions, they ask questions to understand how that person or department fits into the entire structure that is the organization. They credit others for having expertise and trust that others speak the truth, unless proven otherwise.
One midlevel product manager we know was frustrated by his company’s information technology (IT) department. The manager needed to enable a client company to access data stored on his company’s servers. IT refused to allow this. In a cross-functional meeting to resolve the problem, the manager met one of the frontline programmers.
The meeting didn’t resolve the issue, but the programmer, who was a hidden leader, took the initiative to talk in detail with the product manager. He learned why client companies needed to access certain company information behind the firewall, and he educated the project manager about the challenges of enabling such access to people outside of the company. During the conversation, both the product manager and the programmer realized the negative customer experience that would result if access created a data security breach. With this understanding, the hidden leader was able to work with customer-facing staff and internal IT colleagues to provide the critical data without allowing live access past digital security measures.
When colleagues in one function refer a problem or a challenge to someone in another function, it is possible that other person is a hidden leader. Through the leader’s relationships and integrity as a person, the leader’s reputation has seeped out of the functional area. People known across an organization—whether for honesty, integrity, ingenuity, or collaboration—are often the hidden leaders who are truly concerned with others’ success as well as their own.
WORKSHEET: IDENTIFY INTEGRITY
Use the worksheet below to help identify potential hidden leaders who demonstrate integrity in your organization. Answer each question without too much thought. You will remember the hidden leaders you’ve unknowingly interacted with or heard about. The online worksheet enables you to print or share your results.
Answer this question… |
By identifying a specific person |
(Answer by identifying the first person who comes to mind.) |
(Write a function or job title if you wish to protect the person’s identity.) |
A work team is stuck with a process problem. Who would its members ask outside of the team for help? |
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A project faces a potential conflict of interest. Who raised the issue in the first place to the project team? |
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When your team must make a decision without all the facts, to whom do the members go for advice? |
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Who in your work group will dependably make decisions or act to address a problem? |
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Who in your work group would you ask to identify someone who might be good for a specific role or project? |
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Who in your organization is known for honesty? Collaboration? Ingenuity? |
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If you wanted to understand what someone in another function does, who might you ask in your company? |
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Who did you name most often? |
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HOW CAN YOU SUPPORT INTEGRITY?
We don’t pretend that we have the keys to affecting people’s ethics in adulthood. Hopefully, your organization looks for and hires people who are moral and ethical in general. You begin with people whose values are consistent with the stated ones of the company.
However, courage and consistency in behaving with integrity can be encouraged or discouraged by co-workers, supervisors, and managers. Company structures and organizational responses can discourage people’s ability to show integrity. They can make it difficult for employees to maintain moral positions contrary to demands of the organization. Such company structures and responses are especially influential when they organically conflict with the company’s stated values.
For hidden leaders around you to thrive, you must support and show integrity in acting in accordance with your company’s values, even if that integrity creates uncomfortable situations or challenging confrontations. Support emerges from people in positions of situational power who also display integrity: team leaders, supervisors, managers, and executives. In any organization, these are the people who initiate the culture that others will follow.
It is especially important that positional leaders show strong support when hidden leaders demonstrate integrity. We believe that this support takes three important forms: responding positively to integrity, incorporating integrity into the culture, and showing integrity yourself when it counts most: facing ethical dilemmas.
Integrity that is easy to engage is usually perceived as an obvious behavior. Management’s response to difficult situations makes the biggest difference in a hidden leader’s willingness to take a visible and ethical stand. When you as a manager see a hidden leader demonstrating integrity, especially in the face of rejection, it is important that you respond positively.
How do you know a difficult situation involves a hidden leader’s integrity? This is the manager’s challenge. Integrity emerges when others suggest processes or approaches that cross the line between honest and dishonest actions, and the hidden leader points out the dishonesty. It shows when people speak ill of someone in the room or not in the room, customer or otherwise, and the hidden leader objects. Sometimes it appears as conflict, as when a hidden leader refuses to adhere to a plan because it goes against the company’s stated values. Similar conflicts emerge when the hidden leader sees actions that contradict market requirements or legal restrictions. Integrity can also arise when abusive behavior or speech is aimed at someone who cannot defend himself, for whatever reasons, and the hidden leader comes to that person’s defense.
In these and other situations, your first responsibility is to determine if there are underlying causes for the conflict. If the conflict is based on personal issues unrelated to the problem, it is your responsibility to stop the conflict and help the people involved uncover whatever hidden agendas are driving problems. Knowledge of the people involved and the overall situation will help in that determination.
If, however, no hidden agendas emerge and a hidden leader truly is exhibiting integrity, you must support the leader’s position, verbally and visibly. If conflict or abusive behavior is happening, first stop the conversation and ask people to take a few moments before continuing. Then, after acknowledging the hidden leader’s courage in bringing up the issue, ask the group to discuss the situation and any ethical dilemmas raised.
A hidden leader might also demonstrate integrity by speaking to you privately to point out ethical lapses or dilemmas she is facing on the job. When this happens, support the leader by listening and addressing the situation. Others may have to be involved in the conversation later. Commend the leader when she has the courage to raise issues that affect the company and the customer.
Acknowledging integrity and acting to resolve the situation are excellent support mechanisms for hidden leaders. Rewarding integrity is a third supportive element. Rewards can be public acknowledgments, new assignments, or engaging the leader in the solution. By embracing the integrity of hidden leaders and not avoiding or hiding the issues, you best support the leader’s courage and ability to continue to show integrity.
For example, Chuck, a division manager in a large insurance company, hired Linda, a technical writer, to help complete a product manual for insurance agents. Linda’s employee status was LTE—limited-term employee. Her position would end as soon as she completed the assignment.
Different managers were responsible for each product, so Linda began by developing a work plan calling for a series of interviews with appropriate managers. After she got approval from Chuck, she began conducting the interviews. As she worked, one name came up several times—Nancy in the project management department. Linda learned that managers who hire LTE staff were required to work with the project management department to ensure that projects were completed on time and on budget. Chuck had never contacted anyone in that department.
This new information put Linda in an awkward position. Had Chuck neglected to involve project management when he hired her? Or was he trying to avoid oversight of his project for some reason? Unfamiliar with the culture of this workplace, Linda suspected that messy office politics were behind the situation.
Linda called Chuck before continuing her work. She said that she had learned that working with the project management department was a requirement for LTE managers and staff and that she felt uneasy going any further until the department was involved. Doing this was a risk for Linda: Calling attention to this issue could upset Chuck and put Linda’s contract at risk.
Chuck did what a positional leader should do when he sees integrity. He thanked Linda for telling him. He agreed that Nancy should manage the project, and offered to contact her about Linda’s work and deadlines. He would arrange for Linda to report to Nancy on schedule and budget matters while continuing to work with him and his team about the content of the manual.
“I apologize for not getting project management involved from the start,” Chuck said. “This is the first time I’ve worked with an LTE, and I wasn’t aware of the procedure.” He thanked Linda again and assured her that she had acted appropriately.
Linda had behaved with integrity in a challenging situation. There was nothing insidious about Chuck’s oversight, and he recognized and appreciated the intent of Linda’s approach.
Ethical dilemmas are inevitable in any company trying to succeed. In organizations that support integrity, you can best handle these dilemmas in ways that support the company’s ethics and values. Further, do not hesitate to discuss these dilemmas and the ethical management of them. In other words, support integrity by showing integrity, especially in the face of unpleasant behaviors, conflicts, and challenges.
Of course, you can show integrity only insofar as upper management does the same. If the executive suite encourages and rewards success-at-any-price behaviors, the entire culture will become ethically challenged. Those employees who do pride themselves on their integrity soon leave, which strengthens the dysfunctional culture. If you find yourself in a culture at odds with your personal integrity, you may want to look for another organization more attuned to your sense of right and wrong.
However, in many situations, ethical dilemmas emerge because the executive suite sets conflicting goals for the organization. For example, a salesperson may fudge reports to meet stated sales goals although knowing that the customer has not truly decided to buy. Given the salesperson’s need to meet the goals or face a manager’s ire (anticipated instead of the help needed to uncover why goals are not being met), this type of false reporting can be expected.
You can help by posing these conflicts to executives and asking them for guidance setting and supporting realistic priorities. You can also identify unintended consequences of certain success measures and ensure that the executive suite knows what is happening on the front lines. The classic example of this is a call center dedicated to customer service that measures (and rewards with bonuses) those workers who handle high call volumes. Without an added measure of customer service quality, no manager should expect people on the phones to value customer service.
A more critical example involves companies that profess safety as a high value but avoid answering questions about priorities from managers, supervisors, and employees when deadlines push. By evading a clear answer, executives undercut their stated value of safety because no one on the front lines truly believes management cares. They also undermine productivity: Given the choice between dangerous behaviors or productivity, supervisors and workers are unsure how to proceed. The result can be work slowdowns, confusion, or in the worst cases, employee injury.
By showing integrity when addressing these common challenges—as opposed to blaming others for the problems—you act as a role model for others. The courage and strength to do so will be rewarded by support from employees who will also address these challenges and dilemmas instead of ignoring them.
While most people believe they have strong ethical codes, many face situations in which adhering to those codes is a slippery slope. This may be because of conflicting requests or unclear assignments. You can help eliminate these challenges by consistently referring to the value promise of the company and emphasizing that success means success for all.
For example, a project manager with integrity may want to meet customer demands. But when those demands erode the company’s profit margins or eat into the project manager’s ability to help other customers, it’s time to stop the slide. An ethical manager will point out that the customer and the company must succeed. If you can spot these situations before they occur, or offer reminders of what is important overall, you help integrate integrity into employees’ daily thinking processes.
You can also talk about integrity when meeting with staff or peers. Raising the importance of what integrity means for the company reminds people of what constitutes ethical conduct. Proactive, regular discussions focus people on integrity and ethical behaviors and reinforce the organization’s values.
By discussing integrity before it emerges as part of an issue or conflict, you help build a stronger code of ethics. Employees who can quote a manager’s ongoing concern for integrity feel supported when they face dilemmas on their own.
DOES YOUR CULTURE SUPPORT INTEGRITY?
It is one thing for an organization to employ people who demonstrate integrity. It is another thing for an organization’s culture to support that integrity.
Cultures supportive of integrity create environments that appreciate, recognize, and reward behaviors that are consistent with their values. This becomes obvious when ethical dilemmas emerge. In these situations, a culture’s integrity is on display. Ongoing support for integrity is less obvious, though just as important, during everyday, sometimes-mundane actions of an organization’s individuals. This daily support for integrity illustrates a culture’s true commitment to integrity.
You can determine if your culture supports integrity by paying attention to everyday efforts and results. Does your company regularly deliver on its promises to customers? Are commitments met? Do people consistently act in the best interests of the enterprise, the customer, company stakeholders, and employees? Do workers get honest feedback about how they might improve performance? Are conversations genuine and productive in the face of conflicts? Do people believe they have contributed significantly to the organization? A company culture that can answer “yes” to all of these questions has aligned its actions with its integrity. For these things to be routine and usual, surrounding influences must clearly reinforce people who act in line with their integrity. People must be confident that the culture is on their side in terms of professional career and personal safety.
Organizations that demonstrate integrity enable people to create results while being consistent and reliable. This visible integrity is not just about character; it is also about capability. One of its clearest demonstrations is the ability to deliver on promises. That goes for individuals and organizations alike. When an organization’s culture stresses accountability for actions, behaves in accordance with the values of the business, and establishes a safe environment for speaking the truth (especially when the truth is unpopular), it makes its integrity clearly visible.
Unfortunately, many hidden leaders find themselves in a company culture that does not support their demonstrated integrity. Sometimes these leaders are hired before their personal leadership traits have developed. Other times their integrity emerges because they see the damage that a toxic culture lacking integrity imposes on people and companies.
However they find themselves in nonsupportive organizations, hidden leaders are often punished when they demonstrate integrity. While some may hang on for longer periods of time, many will leave—or be asked to leave.
In psychology, it is a truism of family structures that if one member of the family changes the way he interacts within the family, one of two things will happen: The family, too, will change and adapt, or the changing person will be rejected from the family as a whole. The same is true in toxic or dysfunctional organizational cultures. When hidden leaders challenge the status quo, especially around integrity and ethics, either the organization shatters its old ways of doing things and transforms, person by person, or the hidden leader is fired—or quits.
For example, in one consulting project, our charter was to gather information about needed supervisory skills in a Bay Area tech company that was past its initial start-up stage. While the culture of the company was friendly and forward thinking in terms of its products, it was also largely male and white.
One frontline supervisor, a middle-aged woman, was in our opinion a highly qualified hidden leader: She was creative, experienced, and brave enough to say what was in everyone’s minds in all types of meetings. She didn’t grate when she spoke the truth and was able to couch her comments in terms everyone could understand. She also was fantastic at asking questions to help understand other people’s positions and uncover any holes in their logic or thinking.
In a meeting with her manager, this hidden leader, who was white, mentioned that the company might review its hiring practices. She pointed out that they were in the middle of San Francisco, and no one in management was of Asian or African American descent. The only woman executive was the vice president of sales. But several salespeople had complained to this hidden leader that morale in sales was very low, largely because of their executive’s perceived dishonesty. This leader wondered aloud to her manager when hiring diversity was going to be made a priority, since the customer base was very diverse.
The hidden leader’s manager listened and said little about her comments. We were surprised, however, that in a few months, when the company faced layoffs because of lagging sales, this hidden leader was one of the first employees to be let go. Obviously, this culture was not open to internal questions about upper management’s approach to employees, and it released a powerful figure who might have helped it reverse falling sales statistics.
You can spot if your organization is hurting itself by rejecting hidden leaders when it would benefit culturally and financially from listening to them instead. At that point, you also have a choice: Support the hidden leader by challenging the status quo, too, or leave the organization to join a culture that more closely matches your personal code of ethics and integrity.
Within cultures where the organization’s morality conflicts with a hidden leader’s individual ethical code, there will be conflict. The hidden leader will be the Cassandra, the person warning the organization that things are not all well and disaster is coming. In company cultures where the moral approach is to listen to others and evaluate situations objectively, these warnings may be heeded. In cultures where the individual doesn’t matter—and sometimes honesty or collaboration don’t matter either—the person will be ignored at the least or punished by demotion or removal.
If you listen closely, you can tell if your company culture supports or represses ethical questions by hidden leaders. When a team is about to do something wrong for the organization or customer, does someone say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter”? When someone suggests a downright unlawful act, does the group accede silently without saying anything? When a hidden leader does point out an unethical decision, is that person commended—or fired?
All organizational cultures end up with the people they deserve—that is, the people who embody the culture’s moral code, for good or bad. When a hidden leader doesn’t fit, the group usually rejects the leader. By noticing which people the culture rejects, through firing or ignoring, you will learn a lot about your culture’s moral and ethical code. If you see your organizational culture consistently acting against sustainable ethical and moral long-term interests, or the interests of its customers, stakeholders, and employees, it may be time to move on.
It’s easy to be consistent when everyone agrees. When people offer opposing ideas, solutions, and decisions, consistency is more difficult to maintain. In healthy organizations, these conflicts are resolved by finding new solutions or making new decisions that incorporate the fundamental ethics of those involved and are best for the organization and its customers, stakeholders, and employees. In dysfunctional or toxic organizations, the solution to conflict is often asking individuals to abandon their beliefs and moral judgments.
Consistency doesn’t mean obstinacy. Hidden leaders depend on their code of ethics to help them make decisions. Because these codes are broad based and include the well-being of everyone in the situation, they enable hidden leaders to adjust their views and remain true to their ethics while adjusting the “how” of an action. Those who maintain consistency and are inflexible in light of others’ needs are not hidden leaders: They are simply stubborn.
True hidden leaders often step back when conflict arises. They use their relational skills to communicate their own points of view and ask others to clearly state their opinions. Then hidden leaders tend to find common ground that enables everyone to remain true to their fundamental beliefs and ethics.
When hidden leaders act this way in a dysfunctional culture, you may see them labeled as troublemakers or meddlers. Others may pressure them to let go of their points “just this time” and oppose them when the same issues arise again and again over time. When you see an individual constantly in conflict who states fundamental ethical beliefs as the source of the problem, you would be well served to investigate this person and situation.
There are, of course, troublemakers and meddlers who simply want attention or want to be right; your research will have to uncover those. But when so-called troublemakers have a strong ethical code and present their argument in a way that would promote the interests of the company, you have found a hidden leader who could help transform that culture into a more healthy and successful organization.
One of the most difficult aspects of demonstrating integrity is the courage to do so in conflict situations. We have already identified this characteristic as one of the foundations of the hidden leader. But how a specific culture responds to a hidden leader’s courageous acts reveals more about the culture than the hidden leader.
When a culture is truly open to the contributions of all employees, the courage to show integrity is rewarded. People listen to hidden leaders who are speaking out and act to support the leader’s observations. Others acknowledge a hidden leader’s integrity. These companies find ways to resolve issues or solve problems when hidden leaders point out actions that contradict the organization’s own ethical position.
In company cultures with hidden agendas—where an actual goal (usually of increasing profits) is in conflict with a stated goal (such as safety or customer service)—the courage to demonstrate integrity is often punished. Such courage can also earn a hidden leader the reputation as a troublemaker or complainer. In extreme cases, when multiple hidden leaders display courage, it can prompt conflict between management and employees.
We have seen this especially in sectors like manufacturing, where some work is potentially physically dangerous. If management verbalizes the importance of safety but finances only productivity (say by not providing sufficient workers on an assembly line), hidden leaders will speak up and build support from others. The result can be dangerous to the productivity of the company as a whole and does not build trust between those doing the dangerous work and their managers.
Punishment can be subtle in situations where hidden leaders show the courage to act. For example, in a team meeting, a hidden leader might question how well customers will be served by a specific change in product marketing or pricing. If you hear no discussion about these comments, or others simply ignore them or deem them to be irrelevant, you may be working in a culture with hidden agendas. Other elements may be at play, but when these comments pass unmanaged, it is wise to investigate further.
Sometimes punishment for raising ethical issues is more intense than simply being ignored or made irrelevant. Hidden leaders may have their careers derailed. They may see important projects assigned to others or their contributions to fundamental decisions minimized. If you see a potential hidden leader marginalized, wonder about the source of this treatment. Are there other agendas besides the public ones under which everyone is working? Do some individuals wield more power behind the scenes, noticeably those who are not liked or admired within the organization?
When a culture is functioning well, it takes courage to raise issues that may go against the opinions of others. In dysfunctional cultures, this courage is punished, so hidden leaders may refrain from showing integrity. In most cases, when they can, they leave (or are asked to leave) to find a culture that appreciates their abilities to remain ethical and honest even in difficult situations.
WHAT CAN YOU DO TO ENABLE CULTURAL INTEGRITY?
Ultimately, how management creates and sustains a company’s cultural environment is what enables integrity. As we stated earlier, this is more than not lying, stealing, or cheating. It also means creating a culture that encourages people to say the same things up and down the established chain of command. Cultures with integrity discourage employees from discussing one thing privately and espousing something else publicly. They also reject personal agendas that are not in line with the interests of the organization. Enabling integrity as a culture is less about rules and more about how people behave on a consistent basis.
When we work with companies to improve or change elements of their culture, one of the most frequent focus areas is values and how they are modeled. While it is fundamental for a company to promote its values to its employees, it is critical that positional leaders of the organization champion those values in their daily decisions. Hidden leaders can help create ethical cultures because their behaviors are driven by their personal ethical codes. Since organizational culture reflects the underlying beliefs that drive behavior, others look to hidden leaders as the models for these beliefs.
You can promote cultural values in your organization by taking them seriously. Look for ways to link these values to decisions and comments you make. Help others see connections to values. Further, speak up yourself when you see your company’s values exploited for the wrong reasons, or contradicted by decisions, actions, and pronouncements.
Many daily decisions or actions made within organizations are not necessarily dealing with right or wrong. Sometimes people must choose between two ethical alternatives. In these cases, a culture that supports the organization’s values creates an environment that enables people to make good decisions. By “good” we mean effective, productive, and positive decisions that lead to a better future for the company, its people, and its customers. Making and keeping commitments, being transparent about decisions, and demonstrating consistency are the kinds of good behaviors that reinforce the integrity of an organization. They help establish cultures that support integrity.
Keeping verbal and contractual commitments builds credibility and trust in organizations and people. When this accountability is expected, it reinforces integrity as a core value of the organization. Institutional reliability creates an atmosphere where people know they can depend on others to do their parts.
For example, we were interviewing a team of engineers in a large telecommunications firm about the culture of the organization. During the conversation, one of the participants described how team members “played with a no-look pass.” This basketball reference, describing how one player confidently lobs the ball toward a teammate while looking in another direction, was telling. It implied that all team members could be counted on to do their parts.
This team’s feeling of integrity was palpable. It was clear team members trusted one another to make good choices and perform at high levels. This confidence emerged not from blind trust, but because team members had a record of keeping commitments. They personified the values of the organization in integrity that showed.
Transparency in decision making allows people to see explicitly the rationale for choices and directions. Visibility about why decisions are made creates an environment that encourages open discussion and an exchange of ideas. This is particularly valuable when trying to increase employee engagement, which many of our clients express as an important objective. For example, when companies openly share financial information as an underpinning of corporate goals, it demonstrates a culture where trust and integrity is prized. This encourages a deeper level of involvement from those in the organization.
Consistency in decisions, approaches, and behaviors also supports integrity. When workers can count on you to respond consistently, it creates a sense of ease. This sense is not a lack of variety in the negative sense. It is an ease born of trust that you will act in the best interests of all involved.
Each of these factors—keeping commitments, consistency, and transparency—underpin a culture of integrity. They are also factors that influence an organization’s ability to deliver high performance and value to its customers.
Many times, we have seen perfectly ethical people in an organization do things that didn’t make sense for the company, the customer, or other stakeholders. It wasn’t that the culture was unethical; it was that certain structures were in place that actually rewarded people for doing the wrong thing. In these situations, hidden leaders are unlikely to raise issues and concerns, because the structures around them are created and condoned by management.
In sales, we see this sort of structural conflict regularly. Annually, a company’s most successful salespeople are often “rewarded” by being assigned ever-higher quotas. These quotas are measured monthly or quarterly, although a rapid sales cycle for a company’s critical product is many months long. We have seen many companies that neglect to measure any interim steps, forcing salespeople to either hide upcoming sales until they need the numbers or stuff poor prospects into the pipeline. In our opinion, it isn’t that these salespeople necessarily lack integrity; it’s that the very structure of how salespeople are measured and managed promotes questionable reporting.
Decades ago, America’s train companies were in trouble. Trucking had not yet developed as an obvious partner to train transportation, and no train organization in the country was making a profit. It looked like moving products by train was on the way out.
One company, desperate to improve its productivity, created a simple rule for its engine shops, which repaired the huge diesel engines that made the railroad run. No one engine could be in a shop for more than three days. The intent was that the shops would focus on getting the engines up and running again.
The result was, sadly, hilarious: Caught with a badly damaged engine, and measured for success only in terms of moving engines out, a general manager simply told the shop manager to hitch the unrepairable-in-three-days engine to a train that was headed for someone else’s region. The result: The company’s most badly damaged engines were dragged around the country for years, unrepaired.
With no general manager measured on the impact he or she might have on other regions, but each one rewarded for getting those engines out on time, the GMs were “successful,” as the company lost the use of some of its most important property—the engines that ran the business. Executives and managers throughout a company need to evaluate measurement systems carefully for unintended consequences like these. For better or worse, it is our experience that what is measured gets done, although what gets done may, at heart, damage the company’s bottom line.
Perhaps we are too optimistic, but we believe most people want to do the right thing. But to expect a hidden leader to stand up to the entire structure of a company and push back against management’s measurement rules in order to do the right thing is Pollyanna thinking at its worst. To ensure a strong, ethical culture from the beginning, look at potential unintended consequences of the measurement system within your organization. Communicate negative consequences to your management. In most cases, you will find that the C-level did not intend for these to emerge in the quest for effective measurement.
CAN YOU TEACH INTEGRITY?
A person’s integrity develops early in life. Once formed, it is difficult to alter, change, or improve a person’s integrity or ethical position. It becomes part of each person’s individual psychology or self-identity.2
We do not believe integrity can be taught in the organizational environment. It can be supported with behaviors congruent with company values. Alternatively, individuals’ integrity can be undermined with aggressive verbal attacks, a lack of support, and “political” actions within an organization.
We believe that many people work from a base of integrity, whether it shows or not. We see employees exhibit integrity regularly. Not all of them, however, are hidden leaders. This doesn’t mean they are not valuable to your organization. People with integrity are an important part of a company’s success. The more that integrity can be incorporated, from the top down, into an organization’s culture, supported, and rewarded, the better that company’s employees will be able to bond, engage, and succeed.
If you see people who you believe have shown integrity leaving your company because they have been admonished or called troublemakers, or simply feel they are in the wrong environment, it may be time to take stock of how your organization and its leaders are embodying integrity. The following assessment may help you determine if you are working for an organization with integrity. Your own experience is also valuable. Is it easy to raise troublesome issues with management? Do you feel supported when you raise issues to people in powerful positions? Are you confident that the stated values of your organization truly drive decision making at the highest levels?
On the other hand, if you see hidden leaders who show integrity and are neither punished nor rewarded, it may mean your company has integrity but management is not aware of the important role it can play in your company’s success. By pointing out ways to support people with integrity, you can help change the culture to one that is open, consistent with its values, and courageous enough to face the challenges of innovation and the marketplace.
WORKSHEET: EVALUATE YOUR COMPANY’S INTEGRITY
While most people believe they have integrity, their actions may indicate that their code of ethics is not strong or consistent, or they lack courage to speak truth during conflict or in difficult situations. The same is true of organizational cultures. How peers and executives respond to hidden leaders’ visible integrity illustrates the company’s level of integrity. Use the statements below to assess how well your company supports hidden leaders and their integrity. Access the worksheet online for an automatic score.
