Very good read...
Quotes from The Integrity Dividend: How Excellent Hospitality Leadership Drives Bottom-Line Results by Tony Simons
- importance of management integrity to a firm's success
- My research shows that the way employees feel about their managers throughout the company has a huge impact on the proportion of each revenue dollar that becomes profit
- Good leadership is, "Whatever I say I'm going to do, I'm going to do." That means I have to know what my limitations are and what I'm capable of delivering. As a leader if you don't fulfill your commitments, I can't think of anything that can hurt you more than that. —Frank Guidara, president and CEO, Uno's Chicago Grill
- Use the word integrity to mean the fit between a person's words and actions, as seen by others
- Behavioral integrity is not about what a person values, but rather how well a person follows through on the values he or she claims to hold
- As effective leaders (or business partners, suppliers, or board members), our challenge is to penetrate the veil of others' subjective perceptual processes and convey integrity regardless of those subjective processes
- Building an impeccable word requires both excellent follow through and excellent communication skills. Fortunately, both of those skillsets can be developed with training, coaching and practice
- Several studies have shown that trust in leadership drives subordinates' positive attitudes and their willingness to expend effort beyond formal job definitions
- Fairness perceptions and perceived violations of "psychological contracts" have also been shown to affect employees' attitudes, discretionary effort, and retention
- Survey finding: Hotels with high integrity scores typically reported higher guest satisfaction, lower employee turnover, and higher profitability. So powerful was the overall impact of integrity scores on the bottom line that a mere quarter-point difference between two hotels on the ten-point integrity scale translated into a profit difference of $250,000 per year (on gross revenues of around $10 million)
- What these calculations show is that we should not think of integrity as merely a "people" issue. Instead, integrity is connected both to people and the bottom line
- Genuine leadership incorporates a number of attributes, but none of them works until there is trust
- Stated more directly, where employees reported high integrity on the part of their managers, I found: Deeper employee commitment, leading to – Lower employee turnover and – Superior customer service; both leading to – Higher profitability. As final point regarding this study, I want to emphasize that the integrity dividend describes differences between average managers and great ones.
- Trust is a critical outcome of integrity, but trust entails a certain amount of vulnerability. If you trust a person, you are counting on that person to deliver, and you leave yourself open to disappointment (or worse). If, as a leader, you are asking employees to try something new, to work harder, or to focus on particular values, you are really asking for their trust. We know trust must be earned, and this research shows that consistently delivering on your word is part of earning that trust.
- Genuine leadership incorporates a number of attributes, but none of them works until there is trust.
- Leaders' behavioral integrity also affects the culture of the organization and its managers. It determines the effectiveness of change efforts. It profoundly colors relationships with organized labor
- Clear direction goes hand in hand with credibility
- The laying out of consequences, good and bad, is fundamental to leadership.
- This combination of strong connection and clear communicational so engages followers' hearts
- I submit that the engagement workers feel when they are in a trust-based relationship with their leader and have a clear sense of direction trumps even the inspiration that charismatic leaders can generate
- The initiative of engaged employees does not just drive problem solving; it drives customer service as well
- If the leader doesn't have trust, respect, authenticity, [and] credibility, the level of followership is going to be much lower. Workers and managers will do stuff, but their level of commitment, their willingness to appropriately do whatever it takes, is going to be lower. People are going to survive. They're not going to go the extra mile on behalf of that person because that person doesn't deserve it. The survival strategy is, "I'm just going to do my job, keep my head down, not raise any issues, and just try to help out the team and other people in the organization as best I can." Most people in most companies operate like that because that's the situation.
- Managers are almost never evil—they can simply fail to prioritize and build skills for maintaining this kind of credibility. The challenge, then, is one of discipline and skill, not character.
- As I spoke with executives, it became clear that behavioral integrity is an aspect of the organization's culture. In addition to forming part of culture, integrity is also essential for instilling that culture in employees. High integrity managers are better able to shape the culture toward professed values because they model those values and workers trust them
- This gets down to execution, and that's why it gets so complicated. It's not just execution in the sense of "I walked over and cleaned the carpet," or "I walked over and picked up the piece of paper." It gets down to whether you embody the values of the organization. Do you embody the mission and vision of the organization? Do you do what you say you're going to do? Actions that are trustworthy in nature build trust. —Jay Witzel, president and CEO of Carlson Hotels Worldwide
- One of the biggest mistakes that happens over and over again, particularly in big companies, is that senior management expects behavioral patterns or attitudes to originate in the middle of the company, as opposed to from the top of the company.
- summary, employee perceptions of their leaders' word action consistency—their behavioral integrity, their promise keeping, the extent to which they" walk their talk"—demonstrated extremely high impact on hotels' bottom-line financial performance.
Quotes from The Integrity Dividend: How Excellent Hospitality Leadership Drives Bottom-Line Results by Tony Simons
