"Leadership and Integrity"

In their book Where in the World is Integrity? The Challenge of Doing What is Right Bruce Roberts, Craig Rice, and Joe Smith detail the impact of leadership on integrity in organizations. A leader can change an organization: "A good leader can bring hope and a sense of well-being to a company and empower employees to have faith in their own abilities. Leaders can model characteristics of a person with integrity and radiate those behaviors across the organization" (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005, page 89). In other words, if a leader's person and his/her principles match one another then integrity is present and the entire organization and its members will have a well-mentored example to follow.

According to the authors the whole process can work in the inverse way as well. In other words, a group and its members can “powerfully affect the integrity and the leadership style of leaders.” Bruce Roberts offers as an example a federally funded project where his partner at the time, Dr. Howard Thorsheim and he contacted ten thousand people in twenty-four church congregations (one-third inner city, one-third suburbs, and one-third from rural areas). The suburban pastors offered “lament after lament about how their integrity was being challenged and changed by members from their congregation.” They were being asked to transfer their leadership with parishioners from “their open-ended, conversational style of leadership, in which the needs of parishioners determined the pastor’s leadership activities” to “a task-oriented accountability to the church governing board in which preplanned goals determined the pastoral activities. According to the pastors, the focus was no longer on doing what was right for individuals, the spiritual integrity of the congregation, and the traditional liturgy of the church. Now the focus was on what worked to increase the size of the congregation and build larger churches.” (Where in the World is Integrity, page 92).

I can well identify with the pressure for growth at the price of integrity in my ministry in a suburban congregation at the beginning of this century. There was for me also great pressure to reach bottom-line goals of membership and numbers. With many leaders following a business model of leadership in their own weekday workday lives, it was anticipated that the church should follow that model. Now integrity at its bottom line—who a person is and what that person stands for in his/her own work—is really at stake in standing up to the members of the organization. But too often in my case, and perhaps in the case of the voices of the suburban pastors in Thorsheim’s and Roberts’ research, the membership demands won out. Perhaps the larger church became of lesser integrity from the inside out.

All of this back-and-forth nature of integrity in an organization comes into our interest today in our country. If the leaders of the country—from the President right on down—do not show a lot of integrity (an integrated whole of person and performance) then gradually the integrity of the country and its citizens will deteriorate. This is bad news for the future of the USA in view of the “business-minded bottom line growth at any price” leadership that has been demonstrated during the first seventy-five days in Washington D.C. The integrity of the president is also greatly questioned as his budget calls for a belt-tightening in terms of social and arts programs (for example, Meals on Wheels, National Endowment for the Arts, Public Broadcasting) while traveling each weekend to his Florida home at great cost to the country. But the good news is that gradually over time the membership (in this case citizenship) can affect the leadership in a positive way. As people push back at some of the clearly bottom-line moves by our president and other top leadership those people can gradually make a difference in their actions.

Countries, like congregations, need to be reminded of their principles. In both cases the leadership is in service of the whole constituency and anything less will compromise the leader’s integrity. To retain the quality of any organization, the leader must not only affect the membership, but the membership must affect the leader. Even though confidence in that possibility is lacking, the members with integrity must not give up the fight.