Building Integrity and Trust in a Competitive Marketplace

In a competitive market it is more important than ever to establish trust. You can do this best by demonstrating congruency between your values and your business service — i.e., integrity.

Clinical psychologist and executive coach Manfred Kets de Vries, professor at INSEAD, Global Leadership Programme, has been put in a way that I like: achieving a link between your inner theater and your outer world, namely how you respond to your circumstances, such as how you run a business and interacts with others.

As Kets de Vries has explained so well, your inner theater consists of patterns you learned as a child and throughout the turning points of your life. Most people, if they are lucky have had more than one parenting experience.

It starts with your parent(s) and may continue to the next circle with grandparents, aunts and uncles, or older cousins.

Later it continues with teachers in school. Teachers should realize what a sacred trust is being placed in them. Teachers can uplift or shred the self-esteem of a child.

In adolescence, mentoring is sought. If an adolescent is fortunate, he or she will find a wise adult in whom to put some degree of faith, to learn to follow someone trustworthy. This is a profound experience, which should be cherished at any point in one’s life.

As an adult, whenever that time may come, one is the parent over one’s own growth. One has figured out how to chose friends, lovers, time alone, and pursuits that keep nurturing the growing sense of self.

Many call this the sense of Self. Whether you capitalize it or not is up to you. I capitalize it in the tradition of the I-Thou relationship, a term by which Martin Buber described in just two words, the pattern of connection between self-respect and social respect. The respect that one has for oneself continues to others, and vice versa. Thus, there is an interplay of strengthening.

As you enhance and strengthen your own life narrative, your story, you will have a surprising effect on others. They resonate even more with you.

It follows that self-transformation and improvement sets up an opportunity for others to shift in small ways. This is the beauty of the process: it affects your life, and through you, it affects others. The ripple effect, that has so often been talked about, and so often disregarded as cliche, has real meaning in the I-Thou relationships.

In my work, my calling and commission have arisen out of I-Thou respect. This has infused my narrative methods practice in coaching leadership.

I have a commitment to protect and provide conditions for your optimum inner theater to reorganize. My commitment includes respect for confidentiality, non-interference, and respect for the thoughts and experiences of others. I actively question inconsistencies. At a certain point, the inner theater begins to reorganize in a tangible way. This takes a surprisingly little amount of time. Then the client is able to build new structures in the inner theater, and then from this state, they can further reorganize the inner landscape in a self-empowering process.

While the effects are immediate, the inner theater keeps integrating and strengthening long afterwards. The inner theater, reorganized and restructured, works toward maximum evolution. The benefits continue and increase long after the session. This is due in part to the inner urge to be authentic, and is due in part to a ripple effect. Once the inner theater manifests clearly in one’s own mind there are at least two products. One is better brain functioning, and the second is the social impact, receiving feedback from others. These two muscles continue to work together to build upon themselves, increasing energy and effectiveness.

This cohesion of values in the inner theater is what I call integrity. Integrity leads to trust. And in an increasingly confusing world of chaos, this is a great opportunity to open doors of connection based on trust.