Business Coach : Be A Person Of Integrity
-Step 4. We’re assuming now that you’ve got the visualization down. You’ve actually put this on a board. You’ve written it down. But now it’s moving on.
You can’t turn your big idea into reality if you don’t have integrity. So step 4 is serious. So if you’re standing next to somebody and they’re interrupting you, or maybe you’re half watching, you need to slap yourself right here, because this is huge. You have to understand that you must be a person of integrity. You must be a person of integrity. A business coach will tell you how important this is.
Now, Tim, our friends over at Webster’s dictionary define the word integrity as “the quality of being honest and fair; the state of being complete or whole.” Tim, in your mind, what does the word integrity really mean, in practical terms that I can understand?
-It’s really being pure all the way through. Not necessarily pure being pureness, but being the same all the way through. To say there’s business ethics, there’s not really business ethics. It’s just there’s ethics. How do you treat your wife? How do you interact with your kids? How do you interact with your employees? How do you treat your vendors, your suppliers? How are you with your customers? A business coach will ask you these questions
Oh, my customer’s king– we just have to suck up, and we brown-nose and do all this kind of stuff.
And yet I’ve seen people do that– oh, yeah, well whatever you need!
They go into that type of thing, and then they’re yelling and cursing at their employees like they’re lower forms of life on the food chain. That would be a lack of integrity, or a lack of pureness, or singleness for who you are.
-I want to give some clarity to this. Steve Jobs was known as being a jerk. But he demanded excellence. A business coach will demand excellence if they are good! And so everybody in his company, basically, it was demanded of them to deliver excellence. The product was demanded. You had to be excellent. Excellent or nothing.
That’s a strong idea, of being excellent or nothing, and he talked about how a lot of companies want to hire A players and B players. He said he just wanted A players. Well, he had that same mentality about furniture in his own house. If you google this, you can check it out. He actually sat on the floor for a couple years, because he would not buy furniture, because it had to be excellent furniture or no furniture.
He had this mentality about everything. And he was a stickler about what he ate. He was very difficult. Because everything had to be excellent or nothing.
And I’m not saying that’s the perfect character trait, but I’m saying he had integrity in that he was the same all the way through in that core principle. He wasn’t a perfect person. We’re all flawed.
But you also see TD Jakes. That’s a minister. He’s sort of funny, and he’s got ridiculous analogies, and he brings a lot of energy. And everybody who knows him says this is how he is. So it doesn’t throw you off when he’s on stage, off stage. It’s that consistency, and people can get behind that.
-I’ve had one person say, “Integrity is who you are when no one else is around.” It’s that same singleness of who you are.
-Now, Warren Buffett, who’s considered by many to be the world’s most successful investor, and a dude who has served as they chairman, CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway, this guy’s consistently ranked near the world’s wealthiest people, he says it takes 20 years. Now, again, this is not a pastor. We’ve not talking about Pastor Warren Buffett here. This is a business guy. He says, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
Tim, strictly financially speaking, how important is it for the Thrivers out there to maintain a great reputation, in your mind?
-Think about what business is. Business is a matter of transactions. What you want to do to grow your business is you want to increase the quantity and the quality of transactions. When people trust you, they want to do business with you more so that they increase the quantity of transactions with you. They want to buy more, and they want to have an experience with you. We’re in this experience economy, some people are saying.
CLAY CLARK: Yeah. That’s amazing.
-And so people want to buy an experience with you, and so your reputation will attract them to do more transactions with you, or it will repel them, repulse them, push them away from you.