I remember discussing integrity with a successful businessman. He thought that you either had integrity or you didn’t, and if you didn’t have it he wouldn’t hire you. The problem is that I’ve never met anyone who was completely trustworthy, and I’ve never met anyone who was completely untrustworthy. And there’s a lot more to integrity than trustworthiness.
Henry Cloud identifies six aspects of integrity in his book Integrity: establishing trust, orientation towards truth, getting results, embracing the negative, orientation towards increase, and orientation towards transcendence. While I’m not sure I would have picked exactly the same components of integrity, I found the book to be a very useful exploration of what needs to happen below the surface of honesty.
A person who has integrity isn’t just someone who tells the truth. It’s someone who also understands and communicates well with other people, who has a firm grip on reality, who tells it like it is, who has the persistence and fortitude to see things through to the end, who listens to criticism and is willing to endure confrontation and do the difficult jobs, who is always learning, and who understands that he or she is a small person in a very big world.