Back in 2012, my family scheduled a 4- week USA roadtrip but my daughter fell ill and was hospitalised for 3 weeks due to a severe lung infection.
Sadly, I had to cancel the trip.
I filed a $12,000 trip-cancellation claim against my travel insurance policy and I also notified Singapore Airlines about it so they could give the tickets away to someone else who needed it.
The next month, I received a $12,000 cheque from the Insurance company… and to my surprise, I was also informed by my credit card company that SIA refunded me the full $12,000 worth of air tickets!!
Now, I confess it was very tempting for me to keep both, but I decided that it wasn’t the right thing to do and I returned the Insurance money.
(The insurance agent I spoke to was very surprised and actually whispered to me, “If it were me, I’d have kept it!”)
Now, I’m not here to discuss the legality of keeping the cash and whether it constitutes Insurance Fraud.
I’m more curious about this thing we all talk about but few have been able to define – Integrity.
When I was headhunting, I once asked a candidate what her greatest strength was.
She replied with pride, “I have Integrity”, as though it was such an uncommon trait in her industry.
But what is Integrity? Is it just about being honest in your dealings?
As a young kid, my dad taught me that the definition of Integrity had 3 Conditions:
1. “To do the RIGHT Thing”
This is often difficult because the #right thing may not always be the #easy thing to do and this often takes courage.
For instance, if you are behind in your quarterly sales targets and a customer mistakenly buys 1000 lots of your product instead of 100, do you let him know, or do you let it slide?
2. “When Nobody is watching”
It’s always easy to do the right thing when the world is watching – like returning a wallet to a stranger on the train who dropped it in full view of everyone in the cabin.
But finding a wallet in an empty washroom in a deserted park, where keeping it would be untraceable? That’s when the temptation to keep it really hits you.
In such a situation, you will be measured against your own conscience, free from judging eyes.
3. “Knowing that you can get probably away with it”
And the stakes are raised even further when a situation presents itself in a manner where nobody would notice, and you could get away with it, scot-free.
Would you still do the right thing if there were no consequences to your wrong action?
To me, that’s the biggest test of one’s integrity.
But Can You Test For Integrity?
Years back, I watched an a military reality show where the showrunners wanted to test the integrity of their Recruits.
They were made to do a series of obstacle courses in the field and at the end of a very rigorous circuit, they were told they had to do 100 push ups at the end of the field, behind a very tall bush.
It seemed that there were no instructors there, but unbeknownst to them, hidden cameras were placed to see whether they actually did the 100 push ups.
Of the 25 participants, only 6 did.
I often wonder whether we could deploy such an ingenious method to determine the Integrity of our Interviewees. Do let me know if you come up with one!