IN SEARCH OF EXECUTIVE INTEGRITY

September 2002

“There is great integrity when we integrate our inner strength with our other reach.”
…..Rabbi Karyn Kedar

With corporate scandals making the headlines on an almost daily basis, our confidence in business executives has plummeted. More than ever, we are distrustful of their motives, their message, and their actions.

In fact, two recent surveys confirm that employees are losing faith in corporate leaders. A poll of nearly 13,000 workers conducted by consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide found that confidence in senior management has fallen so far over the past two years that it threatens to reduce corporate competitiveness. A July, 2002 survey by the Gallup Organization and UBS, a financial services firm, showed that only 48 percent of U.S. workers believe that most corporate executives are honest and ethical, a drop of 6 percentage points in just one month.

There is a lot of debate about what is causing this apparent surge in executive duplicity. Is it bad individuals? Is it loopholes in the financial reporting laws? Is it “infectious greed,” as Alan Greenspan suggested. Regardless of whatever is causing executive duplicity, we have to reverse this trend. We must ask: what do we, as corporate colleagues, executive coaches, and citizens, do to ensure that more of our leaders act in accordance with the law and our shared values?

There is clearly no silver bullet. This is a complicated situation that will require a multi-faceted answer. In the immediate, we must catch and punish the bad guys to send the message that illegal and unethical actions have personal consequences. We must also review executive compensation and financial reporting systems so short-term wins are not valued or rewarded at the expense of longer term organizational viability.

We must also look at this situation from another angle: Rather than focusing solely on the villains, we need to understand what the good guys do differently to generate significant and sustainable results responsibly. As Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, reports in his five year study of corporate excellence, moral character and exhibiting the right actions daily are not only good for the soul, but are good for business. In Collins’

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