Foundations of Leadership

Leadership is based on 4 key foundations:

Integrity
Authenticity
Being committed to a cause greater than yourself
Being Cause in the matter of your life (Taking responsibility)

#1: Integrity
What is integrity
Integrity is honoring your word. You cannot be a leader without being a person of integrity.
Working with integrity
We can honor our word in one of two ways:
a) By keeping our word, and on time as promised
b) As soon as we know that we wont keep our word, we inform all parties involved and clean up
any mess that weve caused in their lives. When we do this, we are honoring our word despite
having not kept it, and we have maintained our integrity.
In order to be in integrity it is as important to be aware of when and what we give our word to as
it is to live into that word.
Being a person of integrity is a never ending endeavor. Being a person of integrity is a mountain
with no top you have to learn to love the climb.
Distinction between integrity and ethics
Morality and ethics deal with matters of good or bad, right vs. wrong. Morality refers to a societys
standards of right and wrong behavior for individuals and groups within that society, while ethics
refers to the set of values that apply to all members of a group or organization.
Integrity, on the other hand, has nothing to do with good vs. bad (ie it is a purely positive
phenomenon). Like gravity, it just is.
#2: Authenticity
After years of studying leaders, I believe that leadership begins and ends with authenticity. Bill
George1
What is authenticity
Authenticity is being and acting consistent with who you hold yourself out to be for others, and
who you hold yourself to be for yourself. You cannot be a leader without being a person of
authenticity.
Working with authenticity
When I am being authentic, I am saying what I know to be true.
1

During the 13 year period that Bill George was Chairman and CEO of Medtronics Corporation, a medical devices company, its market
capitalization grew from 1.1 billion to 60 billion. Bill George is now Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School
where he teaches leadership and leadership development.

Being authentic starts with having the courage to revealing your real self. If you want to live from
authenticity, an easy access is to be authentic about your inauthenticities. Identify where in your
life you are not being or acting consistent with who you hold myself out to be for others or for
yourself. Have the courage to tell the truth about where you am not being genuine, real, or
authentic
As with integrity, being authentic is a never ending endeavor.
#3: Being committed to something bigger than yourself
What is being committed to something bigger than yourself
Being committed to something bigger than oneself is being committed in a way that shapes your
being and actions so that they are in the service of achieving something beyond your personal
concerns for yourself i.e. beyond a direct personal payoff for you. When you make such a
commitment, you create something to which others can also be committed; and have the sense
that their lives are about something bigger than themselves. This is leadership.
It provides power to exercise leadership effectively; replacing the need for any force. It is also a
source of the passion (what comes across as charisma) required to lead and develop others as
leaders, and the source of persistence when the going gets tough.
Working with this
Each of us must make the personal choice to be a hero or not, to be committed to something
bigger than ourselves or not, to go beyond the way we wound up being. In other words, we have
a choice of being a leader or not.
Not everyone will choose this path, and that is certainly OK.
#4: Being cause in the matter of your life
What is being cause in the matter of your life
When you are a Cause in the Matter of your life - you hold yourself to be the cause of and
hence responsible for everything that happens in your life
Working with being cause in the matter of your life
This is a very counter-intuitive thought. We all live our lives having experienced that several
things happen to us, we are certainly not the cause of several of them.
However, to be a leader, you have to take a stand that you are cause in the matter. To take the
stand that you are cause in the matter contrasts with it being your fault, or that you failed, or that
you are to blame, or even that you did it. As we said, it is not even true that you are the cause of
everything in your life. This is only a decision you are making, i.e. it is your choice that you will
see yourself a a cause in the matter of everything in your life.
Said another way, you are simply saying (to yourself) - you can count on me (and, I can count on
me) to look at and deal with life from the perspective of my being cause in the matter. As you live
this, it will be clear that taking this stand does not even prevent you from holding others
responsible.

As lived, this is very powerful because when you choose to do this, you automatically give up the
right to assign cause to the circumstances, or to others, or to the ups and downs of your state of
mind all of which, while undoubtedly soothing, leave you helpless. Instead, you will experience
a state change in effectiveness and power in dealing with the challenges of leadership
(not to mention the challenges of life).
More about Integrity: Ones word defined
A persons word consists of each of the following:
1. What you said: whatever you have said you will do or will not do, and in the case of do, doing it
on time.
2. What you know: whatever you know to do or know not to do, and in the case of do, doing it as
you know it is meant to be done and doing it on time, unless you have explicitly said to the
contrary.
3. What is expected: whatever you are expected to do or not do (even when not explicitly
expressed), and in the case of do, doing it on time, unless you have explicitly said to the contrary.
4. What you say is so: whenever you have given your word to others as to the existence of some
thing or some state of the world (i.e. when you claim something to a fact), your saying so includes
being willing to be held accountable that the others will find your evidence for what you have said.
5. What you say you stand for: What you stand for, whether expressed in the form of a
declaration made to one or more people, or even to yourself.
6. The social moral standards, the group ethical standards and the governmental legal standards
of right and wrong, good and bad behaviour, in the society, groups and state in which one enjoys
the benefits of membership are also part of ones word unless a) one has
explicitly and publicly expressed an intention to not keep one or more of these standards, and b)
one is willing to bear the costs of refusing to conform to these standards.
If you have to live in integrity you have to be careful when you give your word (dont give it
lightly). In fact do a strict cost benefit analysis to make sure you want to give your word. However,
when you have given it, make sure you live up to it (do not do a cost-benefit analysis to decide
whether you should!). Integrity is NOT something that is good to have, it is a foundation for
getting things done indeed it is a foundation for leadership.

References
This note was shaped from my own as-lived experience. This experience includes living my day
to day life as an individual on my own leadership journeys and as consultant in service of helping
clients and organizations live into their leadership potential.
I would like to acknowledge that this note is only a slight modification of the materials from:

Introductory Reading For Being a Leader and The Effective Exercise of

Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Model by Werner Erhard,
Michael C Jensen, Steve Zaffron and Kari Granger

Integrity: Without It Nothing Works, an interview with Michael C Jensen by Karen

Christensen