Trust is the foundational cement of the building that is your team, and if you want to have a reasonable chance of building a strong foundation, you better have some great ingredients. These ingredients are honesty and integrity. But how do they really impact your leadership?
Honesty and integrity are important in leadership because these values help a leader quickly gain their team’s trust. When a leader has high moral and ethical standards, their employees feel psychologically safe and willing to take risks. This translates to fiercer loyalty, increased productivity, and boosted team efficiency.
This article will talk about the different ways honesty and integrity can impact leadership, including attracting and retaining high-quality workers, opening the lines of communication, and fostering mindfulness, accountability, and good character within the team. We will also discuss how honesty and integrity can help maintain a leader’s sense of power and authority and influence team agility. Let’s start!
Why Are Honesty and Integrity Important in Leadership?
The most powerful way honesty and integrity impact leadership is their potential to attract and retain first-rate workers. When employees feel valued, they won’t consider leaving. Furthermore, word will spread about the team’s ethical standards and potentially induce top-quality workers to join.
Here are 7 powerful ways honesty and integrity can impact your leadership style:
1. Helps Attract Top-Quality Employees
Honesty and integrity in a leader will attract the best employees. Individuals with exceptional skills and lengthy experiences in their field of expertise prefer being in an engaging environment where they feel valued and respected. The more top-quality employees join the team, the more productive and efficient it will be.
In the same way, a leader who exudes honesty and integrity will retain the best team members. Individuals who feel that they are seen, heard, and appreciated will less likely want to move elsewhere. High employee retention — specifically of top-quality ones — is a great way for the organization to ensure synergy, seamless operations, and productivity.
2. Encourages Mindfulness
Highlighting the value of honesty and integrity in your leadership style will help make you a conscious leader. Adopting an open and transparent outlook makes you more mindful of your thoughts, decisions, and actions, and will push the company’s best interests front and center.
Mindful leadership will make you more connected to your team by being fully present and focused on the here and now. You’ll be able to devote your attention, expertise, and time wholly to current issues without worrying about circumstances that have yet to come. This strategy will give you the clarity and composure you need to tackle even the most challenging tasks.
Being a mindful leader will also allow you to better interact with your team. Leading and managing people requires you to be both professional and empathetic in dealing with your workforce, and an open, honest disposition enables you to consider other people’s thoughts, feelings, and perspectives.
Being mindful exposes your organization to these benefits:
- Strategic problem-solving. Mindful leaders consider different perspectives — not just their own — before making any decisions. This tactic will come in handy during particularly difficult situations that make little room for mistakes and require the soundest solutions.
- Positive work culture. Honesty and mindfulness are contagious. Employees feel safe around such leaders and are likely to mirror their behaviors. This creates an open, encouraging work atmosphere where everyone in the team feels valued.
- Stress management. When people adopt mindfulness and a positive outlook on work, stress and anxiety are significantly reduced. Team morale and productivity are boosted, even in the face of dilemmas.
3. Helps Break Down Barriers
Some employees find it difficult and awkward to interact with their leaders. Sometimes, leaders are placed on a pedestal, and whether they exhibit suitable or antagonistic leadership styles, their team may find them totally unrelatable and out of reach.
I see this behavior mainly with new employees and particularly if they are young.
Honesty and integrity help break down these barriers because they make leaders more approachable and trustworthy. Employees feel safe around a leader who values honesty and integrity, so they tend to be more cooperative and supportive. They feel safe about speaking up and sharing their ideas because they know they’re in good hands. They also feel more motivated to always give their best.
4. Fosters Good Character
In the military, the expression “follow me” doesn’t only mean running behind someone on the battlefield; it is actually much broader and more important. It means to be a role model, to emulate the behavior that you want to see in your troop!
Honesty and integrity are among the hallmarks of good character, and these are values that are undoubtedly expected in an effective leader. A leader with good character can inspire people to aim for excellence. On the other hand, a leader with bad character may influence the team to adopt a negative mindset and unfavorable behaviors.
Leaders with good character can also effortlessly gain respect from the team. They are open to discussions, appreciate other people’s perspectives, are humble, and are always gracious. The values they show will inadvertently influence their team members to think and act in the same manner, creating a domino effect that will benefit the organization in terms of boosting productivity and enhancing its reputation.
5. Promotes Accountability
Did you know that accountability is one of the main predictors of achieving a goal? Studies show that when you make someone accountable (including yourself) to complete a task, they are far more willing to spend resources such as time and energy into reaching it.
Leaders who are honest and exhibit integrity are not afraid to take extreme ownership of their decisions and actions. They are not disinclined to admit their flaws and mistakes either. This attitude encourages the rest of the team to echo their leader.
Being accountable for your actions and decisions promotes transparency in the team. It motivates everyone to be collaborative and supportive. It drives people to always give their best shot, yet not shy away from challenges. Driven individuals are not afraid to make mistakes since they know that their leaders and team members are always there to support them.
6. Helps Sustain Authority
Honesty and integrity can aid effective leaders in exerting and maintaining their authority within the team. Having authority means effectively leading and managing your team toward the attainment of set goals through well-defined tactics and strategies. You must be capable of influencing them to follow your lead, accomplish tasks on time, and work together synergistically.
Don’t mistake authority for tyrannical authority. Authority is neither good nor bad; it is merely the manifestation of who you are able to influence with your words and actions. What you do with your authority is up to you.
Don’t mistake authority for tyrannical authority. Authority is neither good nor bad; it is merely the manifestation of who you are able to influence with your words and actions. What you do with it is up to you.
Leaders who are deemed dishonest and unethical will have trouble exercising their “given” power over their team members. Employees might feel as if they’re being deceived or manipulated when they sense that their leader’s intentions aren’t pure. When they don’t trust their leaders, they find it easy to defy and deviate from set rules and expectations. By exemplifying honesty and integrity, a leader can effortlessly command and maintain authority over the team.
7. Makes the Team More Flexible
Have you ever been on a team or seen one where there are just millions of questions? Every time a decision is made, the team spends hours reasoning why this decision is made. What will happen to me? Why was this decision made?
From my perspective, a team that spends too much time questioning every decision is a team that doesn’t believe the organization or leaders are honest with them.
From my perspective, a team that spends too much time questioning every decision is a team that doesn’t believe the organization or leaders are honest with them.
Instead, Leaders who promote honesty and integrity influence their team members to be perceptive, quick-thinking workers. When everyone is in the loop about crucial matters, it becomes much easier to make decisions, devise action plans, and execute tasks. The team can quickly move forward toward the attainment of goals despite encountering challenges and obstacles along the way.
Transparency and high ethical standards are keys to enhancing the team’s ability to respond and adapt to different scenarios. If the rules, guidelines, and expectations have been clearly set by their leader, the team will have no trouble distinguishing upstanding courses of action from those that have potentially corrupt undertones.
