Vital Integrities

HR Magazine, Dec, 2005 by Leigh Rivenbark

Vital Integrities

By George Brymer

All Square, 2005

252 pages, List price: $24.95

ISBN: 13-978-0-9766335-9-4

George Brymer hopes readers of Vital Integrities will end their employees' wondering--about whether the boss is unethical or whether the company's honchos are cooking books or cutting dodgy deals. Only when employees feel they can trust leaders' integrity can they free their minds to do their jobs well, he says.

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Brymer, who formerly had a leadership role in a Fortune 500 company, now teaches a workshop on values-based leadership. His book is less about specific techniques than about raising leaders' awareness about their actions. He outlines six behaviors common to leaders who put values first:

* Accept challenges and take risks. Admitting ignorance is risky but valuable, Brymer finds, and leaders need to be able to defer to others' expertise. Challenging poor decisions, addressing performance issues and volunteering to go first in new initiatives also carry risks of failing or alienating some people, but leaders need to take those risks. Leaders should view setbacks as feedback and should find ways to celebrate their own and employees' failures as learning experiences.

* Master both listening and speaking. Using jargon, euphemisms and "MBA-speak" can make leaders appear less than frank. Brymer shows how to use stories to communicate with employees and how to listen effectively--a skill he says many leaders don't possess.

* Live by the values you profess. Values statements in annual reports aren't enough; leaders must model values personally, and Brymer offers examples. He also looks at the differences between the values implied in a workplace and the values professed on paper. Leaders need to consider hiring from outside their corporate culture and learn to unearth their own hidden biases.

* Give away your authority. Managers assume employees know they should take initiative. Wrong, says Brymer. Employees who don't take initiative may not be lazy; they may just have been burned in the past when they stepped outside their boxes.

* Recognize the best in others. Most organizations focus wrongly on eliminating employees' weaknesses, not building their strengths. Development should focus more on matching employees to what they do best, Brymer says. He also looks at how promoting employees to lead others isn't always the reward management thinks it is. He also rejects the forced ranking system that separates employees into top, middle and bottom performance levels, saying the system ignores good employees who don't draw management's attention.

* Have a vision and convince others to share it. Brymer shows readers how to translate business goals like "Reduce costs" or "Follow regulations" into values to which employees can relate. He shows ways to contrast your company's values with your competitors' (such as by noting that the competition offers low prices but you offer quality service).

A chapter on applying these behaviors addresses problems that leaders face, from getting employees to respect authority to ensuring that employees honor their commitments.