According to the office Cambridge dictionary, Google and Wikipedia the word integrity is “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles”
For me, this covers so much more…
It covers personal and business life values. It is a value that everyone should consider, seek out, strive for or even better; live by.
One of the things I learned very early in life was a saying integrity above self " .
Google shows me that as a synonym: it includes words such as - "honour, honourableness, upstandingness, good character, principle(s), ethics, morals, righteousness, morality, nobility, high-mindedness, right-mindedness, noble-mindedness, virtue, decency, fairness, scrupulousness, sincerity, truthfulness, trustworthiness."
Integrity in Business to Business (B2B) and indeed your private life is paramount…
So, if we constantly live by this in our own B2B lives… what happens when we meet people or businesses who don’t stand by this? It becomes tricky, we either call them out, run or make excuses to move on. It is hasn't harmed you can often move on, learn or grow from the situation.
We have had a past client who worked well with us but many years later was discredited, arrested for fraud and jailed as a business providing fraudulent services to others. To say we felt ill for a few days was an understatement. We felt bad for all those people that past client had wronged. By mere association, once we read about this in the Melbourne papers, we questioned our selves, did we suspect? Could we have done more?
But we were at arm's length from this client, totally unaware and upon reflection and hindsight, it was the best and safest positon.
And yet at the time both the female and male icky tummies came in to play...another lesson learned. Follow gut instinct is a another gem of of advice.
But we were at arm's length from this client, totally unaware and upon reflection and hindsight, it was the best and safest positon.
And yet at the time both the female and male icky tummies came in to play...another lesson learned. Follow gut instinct is a another gem of of advice.
Over the last 20-30 years we have had a great track record, we (both of us are self-employed) have a huge amount of businesses and individuals we liaise with on a daily, weekly and monthly basis that we enjoy working with and who we are hugely protective of in any information they share with us pertaining to their private lives or business information.
Being a business consultant, I often joke that I should write a book, but so many names, businesses, and situations would have to change as I could not divulge and lie in bed straight otherwise. So not a favorable choice for my retirement years but it is fun to joke about it.
When you are dealing with people’s businesses you are dealing with their Intellectual property (IP) and out of respect to them you should NOT divulge information. Many clients ask me to sign a document to keep things in house and I have never said no, the first document I signed like this was back in 1993.. its not that hard for either party.
So moral of the story well this blog post?
Treat people how you would like to be treated. Use that inner moral compass we all have.
Integrity should be a core value of your business and of yourself.
Need to know more about Sam Hicks? check out www.samhicks.com.au