“Integrity is choosing courage over comfort. It’s choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy. It’s choosing to practice your values rather than simply professing them.”
—Brené Brown

I think “integrity” is one of those words that gets tossed around a lot in the workplace. Plenty of businesses like to tell you that they are “a company of integrity” and many of their people will say that they are “people of integrity” but I love the quote from Brene Brown above because it puts a definition to that buzzword and gives meaning to the idea. At Marketing Support Network, I would say we are constantly striving to be people, and a company, of integrity so our leadership team recently sat down to take a look at what that means in practice for us. Here’s what we came up with:

Choosing courage over comfort: One of the things we value in this company is internal growth and promoting from within. In the last 12 months, we’ve made eight internal promotions! On one hand, that’s awesome and I love to see people grow here. The flip side is that internal promotions mean a lot of our supervisors and managers now lead people who used to be peers and sometimes that can get uncomfortable. Integrity in practice here means having the courage to have the tough conversations with people when it’s needed regardless of what your relationship has been.

Choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy: When it comes to taking customer service calls or pounding the phones on outbound marketing calls, fun isn’t always the word that comes to mind. However, there is a right way to treat people on the phones and there is a way that’s fast or easy. If we have a caller who is upset or frustrated, the easy thing is to pass them off to someone else or to get annoyed at them. The right thing is to still do your very best to take care of that caller and resolve the issue no matter how long it takes. Same goes for continuing to dial the phone and put in the effort on cold calls even when reaching people is a struggle. For us, that’s integrity in practice.

Choosing to practice your values rather than simply professing them: As a company, we’ve been leaning into six statements we crafted at the beginning of the year about what “we believe”. From “finding creative solutions” to “standing shoulder to shoulder with our clients”, we have put an emphasis on practicing those things in our work and on calling out team members for doing a great job on those things when we see them. Each month we focus on a new statement so that as a company we are always working on living out the values we talk about.

It is our goal to always be people our clients can trust, and doing the hard work of integrity is a big part of that. What does that look like in your organization?