BFTP: Integrity
Saturday, May 2, 2015 at 05:33AM There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity
- Tom Peters
This post will be tricky if I hope to take my own blogging advice to "praise locally, complain globally."
Over a few weeks (when this post was first published in 2010) a couple of incidents at work have made me think a great deal about professional integrity and its importance in technology. Some breeches of privacy and inappropriate access to a system appear to have been committed by people whose values I thought I knew and who I thought knew better. To the best of my knowledge, no real harm was done and steps have been take to make sure such incidents don't happen again. But it left my faith in human nature more than a little shaken.
In the same way we give doctors access to our bodies and accountants access to our financial records, we give technicians access to our data in order for them to maintain the systems in which it is stored. And both a sense of professionalism and personal integrity keeps those of us who have access to such data from abusing this access. Or should.
When hiring, I've always looked carefully at both a person's technical skills and interpersonal communication abilities, deeming them the two defining characteristics of a great employee. Now I realize that without integrity, neither of these attributes is worth beans. A charming genius who can't be trusted is far worse than an antisocial incompetent who CAN be.
I don't know a simple test for integrity. I suspect most people would know the right answers to interview questions of honesty and privacy and appropriate behavior. Unfortunately, knowing the right answer is not always the same as doing the right thing. And given most people's highly advanced rationalization abilities, I often wonder if any of us can do a very accurate job of judging our own integrity.
Ironically, toward the end of the week, another incident occurred that did much to restore my faith in people. A former employee came to my office with a small plastic box in her hands and a sheepish look on her face. She explained that while doing some spring cleaning she ran across the box that had been stored with the personal school stuff she'd packed away on retirement over five years earlier. She thought the box contained old rubber stamps and was shocked to find that she had inadvertently packed away the library's petty cash - money from lost books, etc. And she wanted to explain and return it. I don't remember at the time that anyone missed the funds and I am sure no one ever would have. Had she kept the money, no one would have known. Except for her, of course.
Reader Comments (1)
Thank you for this article - I believe there are people who misunderstand integrity as a legal / illegal issue. Doing what is right because it is right is true integrity...and something that often gets overlooked, especially when it comes to what some often see as the small things.