How Can You (and Your Workplace) Embrace Intentional Integrity

Integrity. It’s a good word—strong and confident. It speaks to being honest and having strong moral principles. You know integrity is important to have. But it can be hard to define, both at the company and individual levels.

I sat down with Rob Chestnut, former Chief Ethics Officer at Airbnb and author of the new book Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead An Ethical Revolution, to learn more from him about his approach to integrity.

What is intentional integrity?

I began by asking Rob to explain the title of his book. What exactly is intentional integrity?

For Rob, integrity is about having values or purpose in your life or in your company—a North Star. Integrity is the way you commit to operating “even when it's hard, even when no one's watching.” Intentional integrity means being really purposeful about it.

A pretty poster with a lake in the background is not integrity. You need to bring it to life with specifics.

For a company, specificity is key. “A pretty poster with a lake in the background is not integrity. You need to bring it to life with specifics.”

Integrity looks great on a poster. But when hard business decisions need to be made, how can companies stand by those commitments?

Why is integrity essential?

People today—customers, employees, and shareholders—expect more from companies than just profit. Business practices that are unfair to labor or harm the environment are no longer acceptable. We’re seeing a shift in how companies are thinking and making decisions. We need big companies to step up and help solve problems while doing business.

Companies have to be thinking not just about near-term results, but about their employees and the communities around them. Rob says:

…When companies start thinking about broader stakeholders and…making integrity part of business, the data shows that they actually perform better, that it resonates with customers and employees so much that companies [operating] with integrity actually end up outperforming the market…

It’s encouraging to see businesses thinking about the whole ecosystem in which they’re operating. Rob says the Internet plays a big role. It gives employees a voice to speak out about what they don't like inside of a company. And they often find that the world is listening. The same is true with customers. If a customer had a bad experience in the past, people might not hear about it, but today the whole world hears about it.

Who owns integrity?

Rob was the Chief Ethics Officer at Airbnb. But most companies don’...

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