In The Speed of Trust, Stephen M.R. Covey devoted a chapter to integrity.  When describing integrity he used words like congruence, honesty, humility, courage, and ethics.  I have been lucky to have worked with many people with high amounts of integrity for most of my career.

It pays to trust those with whom you work and to work with people of integrity.  When trust isn’t present in the work place everything become much more difficult. In fact, Warren Buffet said,

I look for three things in hiring people. The first is personal integrity, the second is intelligence, and the third is a high energy level.  But, if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.

Jim Collins in Good to Great wrote a lot about getting the right people on the bus.  I cannot say enough about how true this is.  One of my favorite examples of hiring people of integrity is from Zappos.  The CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh is famous for being an advocate of twitter and he encourages his employees to use it.  One might ask, why would a CEO encourage his employees to use such a timewaster?  Here was a tweet that he recently posted, If you don’t trust your employees to tweet freely, it’s an employee or leadership issue, not an employee Twitter policy issue. Point being, policies can never replace integrity.  Alan Greenspan said, Rules cannot take the place of character.

I have always believed in the philosophy hire slow….fire fast. There is a tremendous cost to hiring the wrong type of employee but there is an incredible dividend for hiring and keeping the right type…the type with integrity.

With the right people in your business trust increases, credibility is built, and businesses grow.