CNCounty News

NACo series will examine integrity

NACo is offering a new webinar series called Managing Integrity and Civility in Public Life , a "skills-based" approach to tackling the complex ethical challenges of public office.

This five-part interactive webinar series beginning spring 2015 will revise participants' thinking about ethical decision-making and managing confrontation, transforming their experience as public leaders.

A preview of this new series will be featured in a presentation by series facilitator, Stu Brody, on Monday, Feb. 23 at NACo's Legislative Conference. A look at Brody's framework follows.

I. What We Don't Know about Integrity

Integrity is the most admired quality in a leader, assumedly because it is a rare one. How is it, then, that everyone believes he or she possesses it? Yet, everywhere around us we see evidence of integrity breaches: in business, sports, academia, certainly in our world of politics and government, even the clergy.

This belief that a person possesses integrity and that its breaches are committed by others, not by us is a common belief about integrity.

Consider these 10 other common beliefs about integrity:

  • integrity is the bold as sertion of conviction
  • integrity is about right and wrong
  • integrity is built on a strong belief system
  • integrity is something you either have or you don't
  • integrity is embodied in the Golden Rule
  • the right thing is obvious and something you just do
  • integrity is a matter of instinct and will, not practice and habit
  • breaches of integrity are usually the product of corrupt intent
  • a conflict of interest is synonymous with a breach of integrity
  • integrity is synonymous with ethics

These common beliefs are just that: beliefs and common. They are also largely distortions of what it means to "practice" integrity.

Integrity is "practiced" in the same way someone practices law or medicine, or, for that matter, the way one gets to Carnegie Hall: by working on it over and over again until habit displaces instinct. Or, to put it another way: until devotion to careful deliberation overcomes the temptation for boisterous assertions of belief. It is created in the moment of decision-making. It is not a state of being or a permanent achievement of character.

II. What is the "Practice of Integrity"?

  • Here are three basic tenets of the practice:
  • the capacity to discern one's duty
  • the will to take risks to fulfill it, and
  • the ability to articulate it to others.

It sounds simple, but it is not. Many people have the discernment to perceive duty but lack the ability to weigh risks, and therefore don't take any. Some have plenty of courage, but use it to serve intemperate beliefs. Articulate speech is a great gift, but a squandered one if deployed to disguise self-interest. Blending these skills discernment, courage and credible expression is hard.

Many people know through personal experience:

how hard it is to withstand the ridicule of disgruntled constituents at a crowded public meeting after countless hours of painstaking effort to craft a budget, or

how to refrain from resorting to negative advertising in a close election when a candidate's advisors tell him or her it must be done in order to win, or

how to explain to an uncomprehending young son or daughter why his or her parent had to miss their big game or recital because of a public hearing that ran over.

Holding public office, according to a famous quip, is like being a javelin thrower who wins the coin toss and elects to receive. What is it, then, that enables a person to perform duty under such circumstances, to resist emotions pulling at him or her to flee, retaliate or lie? One thing: to understand duty as the exclusive foundation of action in one's life.

III. The Invisibility of Self-Interest and the Illusion of Objectivity

There are two reasons why this is extraordinarily difficult. First, because self-interest is not only highly compelling, it is also highly imperceptible. People think they see things objectively but in reality they tend to view "facts" through a distorted filter of self-interest; to view one's motives as always noble and oneself as "moral, competent and deserving."

Polls consistently show how people tend to view themselves in inflated terms.

For instance, 98 percent of people polled believe they are above average judges of character. Stock brokers believe in their own competence when numerous studies have shown that success in the stock market is almost invariably a matter of pure luck. Political parties clamor to portray themselves as the exclusive guardians of virtue, right thinking and policy innovation.

A striking illustration of one's inability to acknowledge self-interest was on display a few years ago, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia went duck hunting with then-Vice President Cheney while Cheney had a case pending before the Court. When asked whether he thought this was a conflict of interest, Scalia said, "I don't see how my impartiality can reasonably be questioned."

Self-interest is so e mbedded in culture that people's everyday parlance features scores of expressions to justify it. For instance:

  • everybody does that
  • I'm just looking out for number 1
  • it's just politics
  • you snooze, you lose
  • what difference does one person make?
  • it's only a white lie
  • my family comes first

IV. The Difference between Ethics and Integrity

The other reason why integrity is so hard to practice is that it is seen solely as conformity with written rules. County officials are the subject of extensive and sometimes incomprehensible codes of ethics.

This proliferation of ethical rules compels them to focus on compliance and avoiding sanctions for technical breaches like allowing a county contractor to buy one's lunch. This yields a mindset oriented toward compliance essentially a disposition to stay out of trouble.

Integrity, on the other hand, is about managing conflicts in the absence of a written code: like accommodating loyalty to campaign contributors with the duty of trust to the public, balancing public duties with political ambitions, and public duties with family ones. There are no sanctions for one's decisions on these matters. Yet, reachi ng the right accommodation of these competing duties is the essence of integrity and the hallmark of leadership.

V. Integrity: A Mountain with No Summit

Why should one voluntarily undertake such a difficult path to constrain self-interest, to painstakingly balanc e multiple duties, to question one's deepest beliefs in the search for truth?

The decisive question for leaders is whether to acquire wisdom and serve their communities authentically, or to profess wisdom and serve their own goals selfishly.

Some of the time, this critical distinction is not even apparent, and some don't even know how to ask the question. Those who can, may rightfully claim the true mantle of leadership; those who can't, only the fleeting satisfactions of ego. Integrity is a mountain with no summit. But people can learn, slowly, through practice, how to situate themselves on the path upward.

(Stuart H. Brody is founder of IntegrityIntensive, a company that teaches the principles by which ethical judgment can be taught and practiced, and is adjunct professor of ethics in the Business School of SUNY New Paltz.)

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