Integrity is a core value of most organizations. While most of us may intuitively feel that someone is in or out of integrity, would you be able to accurately describe what integrity means to you?
When I listened to The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success, I’ve had an aha moment. The author Jim Dethmer proposed the most intuitive and beautiful description of integrity that I’ve ever come across.
According to Jim and the team at Conscious.is, Integrity means to:
- Take full responsibility,
- Feel your feelings,
- Speak the truth, and
- Keep your commitments
I absolutely love this definition, because it starts with the core of conscious leadership—taking responsibility—and it acknowledges the role of feelings & emotions.
How many organization truly allow their employees and team members to feel their feelings? Based on this definition, my sense is that most big corporations have a serious integrity problem. And as long as senior leadership stifles emotions and doesn’t give credibility to feelings, I see no hope of such corporate cultures changing any time soon.
It’s much easier to build a clean structure from scratch, rather than change a rotten system. Conscious start-up leaders have a significant advantage over established industry veterans if we manage to tap into this opportunity and continually build a sustainable organization based on conscious leadership principles.
To learn more about conscious leadership, I can highly recommend The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Klemp.
Together with their meditations and other materials, the team at Conscious.is have put together the most comprehensive guide and resources on conscious leadership that I’m aware of.
I feel grateful for living in a time when all such resources are easily available online. Thank you Jim, Diana and team for your uniquely valuable work!
