1. A good leader should be 'satya-darshi' (truthful), 'sama-darshi' (equanimous), ‘priya-
darshi’(pleasant personality), ‘para-darshi’(transperant) and 'door-darshi' (farsighted). A leader
should have a mission and a vision and a spirit of sacrifice, compassion and commitment.
Good leaders maximize their influence of others through trust, competence, and vision. Let’s
take a closer look at trust and discuss two foundational characteristics of a good leader:
truthfulness and integrity.
where = leadership/influence, = integrity, and = truthfulness
Truthfulness
Truthfulness in a leader refers to someone who is honest and avoids falsehood. This honesty is
extended to all both personally and professionally and not just those you lead. Good leaders
avoid partial truth as well so not to mislead others even though they are technically accurate.
Often leaders are exposed to confidential information. Truthfulness should never violate the
confidence others put in you.
Why is Telling the Truth so Hard?
All reasons for lying can be categorized into selfish gain and fear. Good leaders look beyond
their own selfish gain in order to speak truthfully. Good leaders also overcome their fear of
what others thinks about them, fear of confrontation, and fear of taking responsibility for their
own actions.
The Impact of Falsehood
Discovery – The truth will be exposed eventually. It might take 13 years as in the case
of Arnold, but others will find out the truth. The amount of time until discovery is often
in direct proportion to the amount of scandal and how hard a leader will fall. Inversely,
those you lead will likely be less forgiving.
Credibility – Good leaders avoid lying in the company of others. The reason is that others
will always suspect they are not being told the truth even when they are being told the
truth.

2. Stress – Good leaders avoid falsehood so they don’t have to keep track of the tales they
tell. Keeping track of the lies requires mental energy because it is easy to forget what
was said. In addition, a constant worry exists of being exposed.
Integrity
Integrity is often used synomously with honesty and truthfulness though actually has a different
meaning. Truthfulness deals with what is spoken, while integrity deals with the consistency
between what is spoken and one’s actions. The word “integrity” comes from the same Latin
root as “integer”, a whole number. Integrity is defined as the state of being whole and
undivided, internally consistent. When we refer to data integrity in software, we mean that the
data is consistent without corruption.
In the same way, a leader with integrity has consistency of words, actions, values, methods, and
beliefs. Good leaders know what is right and what is wrong and are able to speak and act
accordingly even at personal cost, all the time. As Tony Dungy tweeted:
Twitter / TonyDungy: Integrity is what you do when …
The Impact of Integrity
Productivity – Good leaders are consistent and as a result those that follow can predict
what a leader will do. When the rules of engagement are not known, a team becomes
distracted trying to understand this week’s rules. Often a team will become consumed
with political gamesmanship and seeking to become the new “favorite”.
Empowerment – Good leaders with integrity create an environment where a
commitment exists to do the right thing. Those that follow are assured that they will be
supported when acting in integrity and making a difficult decision. As a result, others can
act without fear of retribution.
Confidence – A leader’s integrity will not be shaken even in the most difficult
circumstances or when the toughest decision needs to be made. Others see the
confidence of a leader acting with integrity as they confront a brutal reality. Jim Collins
in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t coined the
Stockdale Pardox after Admiral Jim Stockdale’s experience as a POW:
“You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the
difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your
current reality, whatever they might be.” (p. 13)

3. Leadership that is not deeply rooted in a foundation of truth is leadership destined to fail. The
reality is that the best leaders are also absolutists when it comes to truth – they view truth as a
non-negotiable. However in the wake of some of the recent, and highly publicized business,
financial, and political scandals, it’s not too difficult to understand how some may actually
question the existence of truth in business or government. If you peel back the layers on most
of the debacles that often transform themselves into highly sensationalized headlines, you’ll
see that said problems often begin with rationalizations, justifications, posturing, and spin being
substituted for the truth. In today’s post I’ll address the often overlooked benefits of truth
telling as a key success metric…
I think sometimes we all need to revisit reality, and examine why we do the things we do. Try
this thought on for size…I believe that truly great leaders view business as a no spin zone.
The most successful business leaders of our time have built their personal brand by letting right
thinking, right decisioning, and right acting serve as their guide. If you have to manipulate the
truth to gain an advantage, the advantage is not worth the perceived gain, for any advantage
gained in deceit will surely come at a very high cost…the sacrifice of your honor and integrity.
While there is not an adult breathing today that hasn’t told a lie or dealt in shades of gray at
some point in time, not everyone is pathological liar. A key difference between those that
succeed and those that fail as leaders is whether they are known for their honesty or lack
thereof. One of the best traits you can possess as a leader is to be known for your candor.
Whether in written or oral form, communication that is clear, concise, on point, and truthful
will gain the respect and admiration of peers and subordinates alike. While many wannabe
leaders possess the ability to selectively self-edit on the fly as they wax eloquent for the
purpose of persuading their audience, true leaders understand that all the justifications and
rationalizations in the world cannot replace the value of the truth.
The truth is an interesting tool in that it is often a difficult master to serve. Telling the truth is
not always easy, and may subject you to substantial opposition and controversy over the short
run, but it will do nothing but help build your reputation, success and sustainability over
the long haul. While I’ve come across many executives that have been able to achieve short
term success via less than honorable conduct, these successes to the one have been short lived
as poor business practices will eventually be found out and in turn will unwind any ill gotten
gains. However I have yet to meet a CEO or entrepreneur who has endured the test of time
without having an exceptionally strong moral compass. When reflecting about how you
communicate and conduct business with others consider the following thoughts:
1. Telling the truth is a habit. For those not grounded in the truth you’ll find that it requires
practice. Each truth-telling event strengthens you for another, and each one gets easier until
telling the truth becomes second nature. It is never to late to start telling the truth. Regardless

4. of whatever your past indiscretions might be, you can change your future by beginning to tell
the truth today. Truth is a habit well worth forming.
2. Telling the Truth is the right thing to do. Lying is wrong. It’s just that simple, and oh by the way,
omitting, editing, spinning, blurring or repurposing the truth is also wrong. Selective truth
telling is synonymous with being a liar. Resist any form of deceit or manipulation if you want to
achieve sustainable success.
3. The heaviest baggage you can carry is a lie. By opting not to tell the truth then you are
simultaneously opting to take on the heaviness of the burden of deceit. Each time you
encounter a person, circumstance, or situation that reminds you of the untruth, your
conscience will weigh you down as you become a fugitive in your own mind running from the
lie you told.
4. Lies will always come back to haunt you. We’ve all witnessed some fairly elaborate cover-ups
over the years, and as we’ve all seen they always turn out the same way…in disasters that could
have been avoided had the truth been told to begin with. You might be able to run, but you
can’t hide from your lies. While you might be able to conceal your deceit for a time, your lies
will always resurface at some point in the future…it may be a week, a month or a decade but
they will find you out.
5. Lies create a barrier to personal and professional development. Time, energy and worry are
often spent on hashing and rehashing wrong acts and untruths. Instead of wasting resources on
fruitless endeavors you could be invest in transacting business, building relationships, learning,
or any number of other positive things.
6. Truth strengthens your reputation and enhances your personal brand. If you consistently and
effortlessly tell the truth a strange thing happens…other people will notice. You will quickly
earn the respect of others by becoming known as a person of character and integrity. There is
no more valuable mental association you can tie to your personal brand than that of integrity.
7. Truth deepens the quality of relationships. There is a distinct difference between the surface
level acquaintances that will gravy-train your success and the deep professional relationships
and true friendships that will endure the test of time regardless of circumstances.
8. A clear conscience leads to a healthy mind. It’s a nice feeling to be able to look at yourself in
the mirror each morning and actually like what you see. I don’t know about you, but I have
better things to do than try and remember all the different stories that I’ve told to people. The
truth is a gentle, healing practice that keeps your conscience clear, provides you with a positive
outlook, and a confident & formidable presence.
9. Truth is a powerful example. As a leader you have in fact chosen to be a role model and as
such it is incumbent upon you to model the truth. When friends, peers, subordinates,
competitors, vendors, partners, suppliers, investors, lenders, etc. see that you actually walk the
talk, you will not only have earned their confidence and respect, but you’ll find that they will
also try to model that behavior.

5. I think the Bible says it best: ”The truth will set you free.” It has been said that a person is only
as sick as their secrets, and I would strongly encourage you to be honest and forthright in your
communications and actions as you’ll be healthier, happier and more successful. How has the
truth benefited you as a leader? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
Truth, honesty, and integrity are important, but they are not nearly as simple as portrayed in
the movies. We may collectively value truth, but throughout our history we have
oversimplified our commitment to it. The result has been a growing weakness in our
understanding of truth and how it plays out in our lives—our individual lives, our political
lives, and, most importantly for this article, our organizational lives.
Organizations are more effective when truth is spoken more regularly. I am bound to get
nearly universal agreement with that statement, and there is plenty of evidence to back it up.
Unfortunately, the ways in which we oversimplify what we mean by "truth" actually end up
reducing how much truth gets spoken.
Three False Frames
First, we tend to frame the truth as simply "not lying." That sets the bar way too low.
Consider a typical staff or board meeting. We do not aim to deceive, but we do carefully
choose what information to present or what statements to make. In the moment, we decide
that presenting half-truths is going to be easier or at least more efficient than opening up a
can of worms with the whole truth. It's too much to tackle the deep dysfunction in that
department, for example, so we'll just briefly cover the workarounds that we've put in place.
This strategy rarely serves us. When we encounter tough problems, we can typically trace
them back to opportunities we missed to deal with the issue earlier on—opportunities we
missed because we settled for half-truths.
The antidote is a focus on learning. When figuring out what to say, how much information to
share, or what questions to ask in a conversation, think about what will generate the most
learning. If you are truly committed to learning, you'll share a lot more than the half-truths I
typically hear spoken in organizations. The result, in most cases, will be better problem
solving.
We also tend to frame truth as purely objective facts. That is a piece of what truth is, but such
a frame narrows down our conversations to focus endlessly on getting the facts straight. That
is important, but it is rarely enough when faced with tough organizational problems. You will
never figure out the dysfunction in that department by narrowing down to one or two facts;
you need to include the subjective and complex understanding of the various people

6. involved. Building the capacity to have both convergent (fact-finding) and divergent (open-
ended) conversations is critical if you want to handle the whole truth in your organization.
The third way we oversimplify truth is by relegating it to the realm of individual integrity.
Personal integrity certainly matters, but the level and quality of truth we get from people in
organizations is far more dependent on organizational culture than we'd like to admit. In a
battle between a culture and an individual, the culture always wins, so if you want to have
more truth available to the people in your organization, focus on building a culture of truth.
Building a Culture of Truth
As soon as we start talking about building a culture where truth is spoken more freely,
however, too many of us will write this conversation off as something to deal with
"someday." Organizational culture is amorphous and hard to get our arms around, and with
budgets tightening and workload increasing, the idea of a culture-change initiative is going to
take the backseat.
Of course, this leaves us in a Catch-22: Our current system of half-truths and incomplete
conversations actually makes us less nimble and less efficient—two qualities we need today
more than ever.
We need to break this pattern. We need to find ways to start changing our cultures today,
even if we can't afford a series of facilitated offsites or a fancy set of inspirational posters. We
need a simple framework to help each of us—no matter where we are on the organizational
chart—to immediately start changing the culture in ways that promote more truth and better
problem solving.
Here is my first stab at it. If you want a culture of truth in your organization, start by
addressing the following three things: walk, talk, and systems.
Walk
"Walk" is simply about individual behavior, as in "walking the walk." More truth requires
everyone in the organization to consciously choose new behavior in situations where truth
used to take a back seat.
If you're on top of the organizational chart, you can't order people to do this. You have to
work with them to create new patterns of behavior.If you're toward the bottom of the chart,
you can't wait for permission to do this. You have to make a decision about how much truth
you think will help you get your job done. I would just ask that you give it a try.
Believe it or not, the easiest context for testing out this new skill (truth is a skill, by the way) is
when you have a disagreement. For example:

7. At a senior management team meeting, the marketing VP presents the direction for
the new website, and you feel it has some major flaws.
In your project team meeting, the meeting planner is leaving a number of details
unfinished and says they can be worked out onsite, but you disagree.
Your boss schedules a team meeting for Thursday at 8 a.m., but he knows that you
have already paid for an exercise class that prevents you from getting to the office
before 8:45 on Thursdays.
The committee chair emails you to say she is disappointed in your lack of
responsiveness from the email she sent "several days ago," when in fact it was sent
late Friday afternoon and it is now first thing Tuesday morning.
In most organizations, the typical response would be this: Don't say anything right away,
particularly if other people are there. Deal with it later and do it gently, because you don't
want to cause problems. If you want a culture of truth, however, you'll have to take a
different approach. How about this:
Confront the person directly, but focus your conversation on what's being done and what the
impact is on you or others. Repeat back to the marketing VP the specific elements of the
design that he described, and connect those elements to possible negative effects on
membership, user experience, or whatever your concern may be. It's not that the marketing
VP did a bad job—it's that you have concerns about the specifics of this plan and its potential
impact.
Focusing on observable behavior or action steps and the impact they will have tends to shift
the conversation away from judgment (this design is wrong or bad, this won't work, you
should have done better) and toward productive problem solving. Perhaps more importantly,
you showed everyone in that meeting that you can disagree out loud and still have a
productive conversation. You showed that complicated, even somewhat contentious, truth is
valued and works.
The same is true for the other examples above. Everyone in your organization can practice
giving people more direct feedback that is focused on behavior and impact (as opposed to
judgment), and it goes a long way in supporting a more open and truthful culture.
Talk
While the "walk" category looks at behavior and interactions among people and groups,
making changes to the "talk" part of the framework focuses on statements we make. You
would be surprised at how important this can be to changing a culture.
Art Kleiner wrote a brilliant book, Who Really Matters, in which he argues that every
organization has a "core group" (not necessarily located at the top of the organizational

8. chart), and organizations tend to move in the direction that everyone thinks the core group
wants to go. Note that the direction is the one people think the core group wants—even if
that perception is inaccurate.
This is where truth becomes very important. When you are the executive director and you
come back from a board meeting, what do you report to your staff? How much detail do you
provide about the conversation? Imagine if the board discussed cutting a program that could,
theoretically, imply layoffs. Would you come back and tell your staff about it, that you don't
know what will happen, and that it has serious resource implications? Many would choose to
say very little, not wanting to worry the staff.
But here's the rub: They are probably already worried. In the absence of your statements,
your people will have no other choice but to invent the truth themselves. Ninety-nine times
out of 100, the stories they make up will be worse than the actual truth. If you leave them
guessing, they might conclude that layoffs are imminent and start asking around about new
positions. You could very well end up losing staff regardless of the board's decision.
There's no simple answer in that situation, but at the least you should challenge your own
assumptions about it. Pay closer attention to what you share with your staff, with other
departments, with volunteers, or even your friend in the cube next door. We have a tendency
to withhold information because it gives us the illusion of control. We convince ourselves that
if we wait and carefully craft a message or package the right information later, we'll get
better results.
That is sometimes true, but decreasingly so. We're all running at an increased pace these
days, so the benefit we get from carefully crafted messages later is overshadowed by the cost
of not sharing imperfect information today. The rest of the people in our organization need
what we're not sharing.
On top of that, sharing information builds trust and strengthens relationships, two qualities
that are critical for operating in today's faster pace. We don't have to share everything; that
would slow us down and be confusing for everyone. But we can be strategic in sharing more
than we're sharing now.
When given the opportunity to share information (like the board meeting summary), consider
important questions like
How will it help build trust?
How will it help strengthen a relationship?
How will it enable other people in the organization to get things done?
How will it counteract fear?
How will it encourage others to be more open?

9. Wherever your role, you can find ways to strategically expand the information you are
sharing and the truth you are speaking.
Systems
I started with "talk" and "walk" to emphasize the point that culture change is accessible to
everyone in the organization. Each one of us is faced with different choices when it comes to
elevating the level of truth in our organizations, but we all have opportunities to take
concrete steps in that direction. The time may not be right for everything, but it's always right
for something.
Organizations are systems, however, so we must complement these individual efforts with
some attention to our structures and processes. One without the other is insufficient in the
long run.
Perhaps the easiest place to start is with staff or team meetings. Most people hate them
anyway, so why not start experimenting there? If you designed these meetings with a culture
of truth in mind, you might end up with a very different structure.
Instead of having everyone report for 10 minutes each about things they have been doing,
you could set up electronic forums for sharing basic dashboard information among all team
members, reserving face-to-face meetings for deeper conversations focused on learning.
Prioritize topics based on learning value and the opportunity to engage in more divergent
conversation. Assuming you've been developing your people's skill in truth telling, the results
would make the time spent worthwhile.
The same approach can be applied to board meetings as well. We are all becoming familiar
with the time-saving technique of a consent agenda (grouping noncontroversial items
together in one item that is voted on without discussion), but what if we specifically
identified agenda items where we knew there would be disagreement and put them first on
the agenda? Association consultant Jeff De Cagna has long advocated for the creation of such
a "dissent agenda."
By building constructive conflict into our meetings, we can actually take some of the drama
out of conflict—it's simply a normal part of our board deliberations. It becomes normal for
board members to express disagreements, clarify why they are advocating their position, and
challenge each other's assumptions. Simple process changes like these can go a long way to
building a more truth-friendly culture.
Paying the Price for Truth
Building a culture of truth is not easy, but no one said leadership was easy. You will encounter
resistance, and you will add some tension to existing relationships. There is no avoiding this.

10. It is part and parcel to dealing with truth. Gloria Steinem has been quoted as saying, "The
truth shall set you free. But first, it will piss you off."
Everyone has a role to play in building a culture of truth, so we all must decide whether we
are willing to pay the price. Are we willing to work through disagreements and tension? Are
we willing to face our own inner contradictions or call out our colleagues? Are we willing to
stay in hard places long enough to reach that point of clarity or insight that produces a new
level of results?
I hope we are, because paying this price yields significant returns. Current research points to
dangerously low levels of engagement among employees, resulting in lower efficiency and
higher turnover. A culture of truth can counteract that. A culture that supports expression
and learning does not typically produce disengaged employees. People who know they can
speak the truth are not the ones who call in sick on Fridays.
So pick an area to start working on, and make some changes tomorrow. Practice giving better
feedback and engaging in constructive conflict. Pay attention to what you say and don't say
and how that impacts other people in your organization. Choose to counteract the stories
your people will invent by strategically inserting more information. Experiment with new
processes and structures and measure the difference.
Don't fall into the trap of oversimplifying the truth. Embrace the complexity, one step at a
time.