You can't talk yourself out of a problem you behave yourself into

Stephen Covey

Maintaining Honesty and Integrity
By Jim Rohn

For anyone today, especially those in leadership, honesty and integrity are absolutely essential to survival. A lot of businesspeople don't realize how closely they're being watched by others inside and outside their organization. Remember when you were a kid in grammar school, how you used to sit there staring at your teacher all day? By the end of the school year, you could do a perfect imitation of all your teacher's mannerisms. You were aware of the slightest nuances in your teacher's voice — all the little clues that distinguished levels of meaning, that told you the difference between bluff and "now I mean business." And you were able to do that after eight or nine months of observation. Suppose you had five or 10 years — do you think there would have been anything about your teacher you didn't know?

Now fast-forward and use that analogy as a manager. Do you think there's anything your people don't know about you right this minute? If you haven't been totally aboveboard and honest with them, do you really think you've gotten away with it? Not too likely. But if you've been led to believe that you've gotten away with it, there might be a good probability that people are afraid of you, and that's a problem in its own right.

But there is another side of this coin. In any organization, people want to believe in their leaders. If you give them reason to trust you, they're not going to go looking for reasons to think otherwise, and they'll be just as perceptive about your positive qualities as they are about the negative ones.

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Dare to be yourself

André Gide