February 16
“And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on earth, a blameless and upright man fearing God and turning away from evil. And he still holds fast his integrity, although you incited Me against him, to ruin him without cause.’” Job 2:3
John C. Maxwell is one of my favorite authors. He has written a number of books on leadership, and one that I am reading now is entitled, Developing the Leader Within You.
One of his chapters is entitled, “The Most Important Ingredient of Leadership: Integrity.” This chapter is loaded with great concepts on the importance of integrity in leadership, some of which I quote below. But make no mistake, even if you don’t think of yourself as a leader, you certainly are to someone. Someone looks up to you, someone may look to you for direction or at least be curious what you think. If you are a person of integrity, this will become apparent, and they will listen to you and respect you for your opinion. If you are not a person of integrity, that also will eventually become apparent in their interactions with you, and they will not value your opinion or respect you.
Here are some excerpts from this chapter on integrity:
“The dictionary defines integrity as ‘the state of being complete, unified.’ When I have integrity, my deeds and words match up. I am who I am, no matter where I am or who I am with. Sadly, integrity is a vanishing commodity today. Personal standards are crumbling in a world that has taken to hot pursuit of personal pleasure and short cuts to success.”
“A person with integrity does not have divided loyalties (that’s duplicity), nor is he or she merely pretending (that’s hypocrisy). People with integrity are ‘whole’ people; they can be identified by their single-mindedness. People with integrity have nothing to hide and nothing to fear. Their lives are open books. V. Gilbert Beers says, ‘A person of integrity is one who has a system of values against which all life is judged.’”
“Integrity is not what we do so much as who we are. And who we are, in turn, determines what we do. Our system of values is so much a part of us that we cannot separate it from ourselves. It becomes the navigating system that guides us. It establishes priorities in our lives and judges what we will accept or reject.”
“We are all faced with conflicting desires. No one, no matter how ‘spiritual,’ can avoid this battle. Integrity is the factor that will determine which one will prevail. We struggle daily with situations that demand decisions between what we want to do and what we ought to do. Integrity establishes the ground rules for resolving these tensions. It determines who we are and how we will respond before the conflict even appears. Integrity welds what we say, think, and do into a whole person so that permission is never granted for one of those to be out of sync.”
We will continue to quote excerpts from Maxwell’s book in days to come.