Trust What You Have Left

September 18, 2020Insights

Your team is working remotely, and you continue to work around the kids, the dogs, and maybe your partner in their underwear. You are running a restaurant where the rules change every day—”Are we open? Are we closed? Can we serve inside? Takeout only? Now we have to take names and numbers? What!?!” If you’re an essential business, you’re balancing safety, continuity, and the emotions of each and every person working.

Your town is on fire, a storm surge is coming, and politics have you downright depressed. Let’s face it, we are all pushed to exhaustion and just trying to survive.

Business owners fight for their companies every day. They wake up hungry and ready to go. But anyone navigating the current economy is reaching a breaking point. With so little in front of you to help make decisions and so little left to give, it’s time to lean into what you already have inside.

 

Integrity

Integrity is “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles,” and it plays out differently across different industries, businesses, and situations. In education, it means doing your own homework. In medicine, it means providing the best possible care, no matter how tired you are. In manufacturing, it means never cutting corners. Although broad and extremely subjective, integrity supports you in three ways as a business owner:

 

Within Yourself

People with integrity embody honesty, humility, authenticity, consistency, and all of the things that translate to goodwill—such as customer loyalty and brand recognition—adding value to a business. As the owner, you are the one who creates that goodwill. Your continued success is grounded in integrity. You were born with or inhabited it and have been honing it ever since.

 

Within Your Company

A company’s culture is a direct reflection of its leader(s). Integrity breeds communication, which gives continuous meaning and purpose to your mission. The integrity you demonstrate sets the standard for your team. While it’s easy to preach and possible to practice, integrity exists organically when people feel respected. A team with integrity works well together not because they must but because they genuinely care about one another and want to do good work.

 

Within Your Customer Service

Most business owners cite integrity or one of its sibling intangibles as a value they bring to customers. Every one of those business owners is right in doing so. If you are a successful business owner, you are made of integrity. Customers choose you because they appreciate the way you treat them, the way you make them feel, and the way you run your business.

Integrity might be intangible, but that doesn’t make it invisible. You have it, we have it, and we can all rely on it to guide our decisions, support our teams, and take care of our customers, regardless of the circumstances at hand. 

You can do this – we can help.