A few years ago, we were having difficulty with a vendor at the TV studio. (For the purposes of this article, we’ll call him Mark.) Mark made promises to come in and look at technical issues with our equipment, then he’d fail to show up on the promised day or show up several hours late. It was frustrating, since he was one of very few vendors who provided the service we needed. One of our administrators got particularly upset with Mark one day, when he promised to come in on a Tuesday and didn’t show up at all. She decided she would attempt to make him feel bad about his delay by telling him that we’d told a customer they couldn’t come in that day, in anticipation of Mark’s visit to “tweak” the equipment, and as a result, we had lost revenue. In reality, there was no client scheduled that day.
When I discovered her “little white lie,” I decided to talk to her about her lack of integrity in lying to the vendor. “You could be angry at him and that would be enough,” I explained. Unfortunately, when I used the word “integrity” to discuss the issue, it didn’t go well. “I have integrity,” she snapped.
What is integrity? If you’re like many people, as long as you don’t tell any “big lies,” you feel you’ve got it. If you generally do the “right thing” in any given situation, you would typically consider yourself someone with integrity. But do you really? Is there such a thing as “degree” of integrity or is it really black and white? Personally, I think you’re either doing business with integrity or you aren’t. Levels don’t count. If you’re seeking positive relationships with customers (or anyone else in your life, for that matter), you are either trustworthy or you’re not. You either tell the truth or you don’t.
Is there such a thing as a “degree” of integrity or is it really black and white?
When I first started seriously considering the meaning of integrity, I believed that, every once in a while, it was okay to lie as long as it could be considered harmless. If I just didn’t “feel like” doing something, I could say I didn’t feel well, so that I wouldn’t hurt the feelings of the person who had invited me. If I know my co-worker didn’t feel like talking to someone, I could tell the caller that he wasn’t at his desk, even if he was sitting right in front of me. It was okay. Life sometimes required “stretching the truth” to smooth things over. Or at least that’s what I thought. As long as I didn’t write bad checks, steal from my employer, call in sick when I wasn’t, or have an illicit affair, I figured I was good.
But was I? Looking back, I now think that I played pretty loosely with the truth. It was in a personal growth workshop that my definition of integrity was solidified. And now I believe that you either have it or you don’t. You either tell the truth all the time or you lie once in a while. And if you lie once in a while, how are those who eventually find out supposed to trust you? Truth is like water – it eventually flows through.
In business, it can be incredibly tempting to lie when you make a mistake. No one wants their customer or their boss to be angry at them when something goes wrong. But what happens when they find out that you lied? All trust flies out the window and the relationship is damaged.
The better bet is to simply go with the truth. That doesn’t mean you can’t think through exactly how the truth should be told. If a technical glitch or a human error causes a delay in getting the client what they need, tell the truth anyway. Most customers understand that business has certain elements that sometimes causes hiccups. In fact, most customers don’t really want to know the gory details of why something didn’t go well. In most cases, simply saying, “It was a case of human error (or a technical hiccup) and now we’re working as quickly as we can to get it managed for you” is enough.
What do you think? Do you do business with 100% integrity or do you practice degrees of integrity? What could you do to ensure that your clients are always told the truth?
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