Would you chose experience over integrity when hiring?

“In looking for people to hire, look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.” Warren Buffet

Integrity is one the most important character traits in a person. Integrity is how you judge if a person is trustworthy or not. Here are some definitions of integrity:

Merriam-Webster: firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : incorruptibility

Oxford Dictionaries: the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles

Macmillan: the quality of always behaving according to the moral principles that you believe in, so that people respect and trust you.

Wikipedia:  a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one’s actions.

When you hire someone with integrity, you are hiring someone who is honest, is moral  and can be trusted to perform the task that they’ve been entrusted with. In essence, you will have someone who will watch your back.

When you combine intelligence and energy with integrity, you have someone you can trust to run your organization for you, someone who doesn’t need to be watched or supervised. Someone who will have your best interest in mind when making decisions, not theirs.

If you only look for intelligence and energy in people, and hire someone without integrity, your troubles have just begun. You will no longer sleep soundly at night. You will have someone very intelligent and full of energy going after their own agenda. Rather than looking out for what’s best for you or your organization, they will be looking out for what’s best for themselves. They will use that intelligence and energy to lie, cheat and steal to get what they what.

A person without integrity will have you believe they have your best interests in mind in order to get what they’re after. Once they get what they want, their true colors will appear. Heaven help you and your organization if you put someone with intelligence and energy but no integrity into a position of power.

You can educate someone to improve their intelligence level. You can motivate someone to give them more energy. Their is absolutely nothing you can do to improve a persons level of integrity. It is a character trait. It is something which defines who a person is. Integrity is developed over time, from childhood until you die. It can change, but usually takes a catastrophic event to cause a person to change.

Failure is an option for too many people these days

“People may fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else.” Unknown

There is nothing inherently wrong with failing. It is how we learn and grow. Very few people are actually successful in their first attempt at anything. We usually try something one way and if it doesn’t work, make a few changes, then try again. That doesn’t mean that we’re failures.

There are people who try to accomplish a certain goal, or task, over and over again. Even if they fail a hundred times, they continue trying. They are not failures. If they accept defeat and give up on that goal or task, they are still not failures. What is important is that they tried as best they could and realized it was something they themselves are unable to accomplish. That is where the honor is, to accept the fact that you cannot succeed 100 percent of the time, to acknowledge that something is beyond your abilities.

When you accept that premise, you learn from it. You learn to change your approach, to try a different tact. You don’t repeat the same steps with the next goal that you did with the previous one, if you know they didn’t work before.

What we see in politics is the exact opposite. No one accepts responsibility for a failure. Mayors, Governors, Congressmen, Senators and even Presidents do this all the time. They try to live up to promises they made. When they are unsuccessful, they find someone, or something, else to blame. When the next task or goal comes along, they try the same approach which failed earlier, again. When that task fails, they again pass the blame elsewhere.

This is why many politicians are failures. Not because they tried something and couldn’t get it done. They are failures because they couldn’t do something and placed the blame elsewhere.

Nothing is impossible. There are many politicians, and individuals, who’ve overcome tremendous odds and failures to achieve success. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Roland Reagan, Winston Churchill, Oprah Winfrey, Vincent Van Gogh, Dr. Seus, Stephen King, JK Rowling, Monet, Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth and even Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

All of them succeeded when others before them couldn’t or when told they should go home. They didn’t go back home, saying ‘well, these people said no’. They kept trying. They tried a different approach if they needed to change. They used the same approach if they knew they were right. Thomas Edison tried 10,000 times to come up with the light bulb before he finally succeeded.

You will never be a failure when you take responsibility for your destiny into your own hands. Passing the blame onto others is an easy way out, and a sure sign of a failure.

Impartial news reporting with integrity: not at the NY Times

“Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The New York Times used to be my favorite source to get reliable local, national and world news. That changed a few days ago after I finished reading an article about one of the two men running for president.

The article started out okay, but as I reached the mid section, I began questioning the accuracy of the information, as some of it was the opposite of what I had always heard and believed through personal experience. I began to question what I had always thought, maybe I was wrong all along. That’s how much faith I had put into the NY Times. That’s how much integrity I put into their reporting, feeling that this was one news organization that wouldn’t try to deceive the public.

Upon finishing the article, I had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right with the article. This particular article had comments, something very rare for the NY Times. I began reading the comments, and found that almost everyone commenting had the same message: the article was completely inaccurate.

This wasn’t just a minor mistake here and there. The entire article, from the title itself to the information cited, were all false and misleading.

Looking to add my two cents, I found the editors had very quickly stopped accepting any more comments.

There is nothing wrong with supporting one candidate over the other, even for a news organization. There is enough material from both sides to present a good argument for your choice. Twisting the truth doesn’t just affect the author of the article, but affects the integrity of the entire news paper.

Now I understand why the NY Times doesn’t accept comments on many of their articles: the truth begins to come out.

It’s unfortunate because now, I have nowhere else to go to get unbiased, accurate news reporting. The news on television lost its integrity a long time ago. Some print and television outlets never had any to begin with.

Are we now forced to get impartial news from the social media, from places like twitter, where it’s reported realtime, as it happens, by people seeing it unfold? Are we reduced to watching a video of the event on Youtube, that is until one of the media outlets gets it removed?

The problem with losing your integrity is that it is very difficult to get it back. For the NY Times, they lost more than one long time reader. They’ve lost their reputation.

For those of you interested, here’s the article:

Romney Says He Paid at Least 13% in Income Taxes

Unleash your natural talent and you’ll do well

“If you are an anvil, be patient; if you are a hammer, be strong.” Kurdish proverb

To be a person of integrity means to act with conviction. You do that best when you are yourself, not trying to be someone else.

To be happy, you need to listen to your inner voice, and do what it says.

To be successful, happy and a person of integrity means doing something most people can’t do: simply acknowledge who you are, and just be that person.

If deep down you are an anvil, you gain integrity by being patient. You become happiest and will succeed when you are patient.

If you’re the hammer deep down, being strong leads you to the promised land.

We do our best when we use the natural talents we’re born with. Education and schooling may give us skills to earn a living, but we will never truly live, until we become what we were meant to be, what we really are deep inside. If you haven’t found it, keep searching. Who we are is in there and you will know it one day, as long as you never stop the search.

 

 

Just be yourself

“Be as you wish to seem.” Socrates

What this quote means is to be the person that you want the world to see. Don’t create one image for everyone to see which is different than who you really are.

Integrity is about being true to yourself and to those around you. When you present a different image of yourself to others, an image that is different that who you really are, you are not being honest with everyone. In order to be truly honest, the person inside of you should be the same person you present to others.

So in essence, just be yourself. If that is not how you wish others to see you, then your inner self needs to change. If you’re happy with your inner self, then project that out, regardless of who accepts you .