Pillars of leadership and business peaceful environment: integrity, honesty, fairness, effective communication, active listening, humility

Various authoritative sources including, Forbes, highlight that leadership is among critical challenges hindering today’s executives.

Leadership is an individual or group's ability to influence and guide followers or members of an organization to voluntarily adopt a certain direction. The Balance Small Business defines 'leadership' as the art of motivating a group of people toward achieving a common goal. John Quincy Adams once said "If your actions inspire others to dream more, do more, and become more, you are a leader".

In fact, leadership inspires others not by means of coercion. There is a number of qualities you need to have, for people to willingly follow you. Then, you actually are a leader. In brief, it's those attributes that will oblige the people to embrace your path. In other words, I can also call those attributes “leadership behaviors”. The latter ones include integrity, honesty, fair attitude, effective communication, active listening, humility, and empathy.

Integrity, honesty, fairness- they go together and are core qualities every true leader must have.

According to Wikipedia, integrity is the practice of being honest and showing consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. The same source adds that in ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions.

The Cambridge Dictionary echoes Wikipedia. The dictionary defines integrity as the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles that you refuse to change. Integrity involves leading by example. This principle requires that you be the first person to implement what you request others to do. This fits in the field of moral authority.

The Team Technology in the UK conducted research in the past. It asked the question "What qualities in a leader will make someone follow that leader?". The first quality, according to the findings, was honesty which is closely linked with integrity. The UK institution says that integrity includes aligning with what you say in public/open air and what you do in private.

The latter definition reminds me of an example that a General Management and Strategic Management lecturer has given us. It was in the framework of the Master of Business Administration Program.

He intended to emphasize that a leader must completely respect the principle of integrity. Here is the example: a man was asked to kill a chicken in a place where no one or nothing could be watching him. He decided to take the chicken into a forest.

Arriving there, he observed here and there. He eventually noticed nobody was viewing him. He took his knife, ready to cut the throat off. But while he was going to cut, he noticed the chicken was watching him.

In the end, he decided not to kill it. If he had killed it, he could have breached the instruction. However, he was alone. He could kill it and say no one and nothing were viewing him. When he returned to those who had assigned him to the task, they asked why he’d not killed it. He answered he’d not done it because it was watching him. They were astonished.

Honesty is the quality of being honest. An honest person is a person telling the truth, able to be trusted and not likely to steal, cheat, or lie, according to the Cambridge Dictionary.

Jon Levy published an article titled “Science has confirmed that honesty really is the best policy in the workplace” at www.entrepreneur.com in 2018.

The article says that almost every company claims they promote values of honesty, transparency and trust. However, it adds that what an organization claims and how it behaves are not always aligned, as recent scandals had then shown.

This article highlights the necessity of messages and information promoting honesty in workplaces even right now.

The Cambridge dictionary defines a fair person as a person treating someone in a way that is right or reasonable, or treating a group of people equally and not allowing personal opinions to influence their judgment.

Personally, I can be a witness testifying the importance of the above leadership attributes in the peaceful environment. To clarify it, I’m going to use an example of a peace-building project conducted in the Eastern Province’s districts of Kayonza and Nyagatare in Rwanda in 2013 to 2016.

The project was dubbed ‘the Promoting Peace Project.’ It was funded by USAID and implemented by two international American non-profit organizations, Search For Common Ground and Landesa, and the local one-Haguruka which defends women and children’s rights.

I was involved in the project as a SFCG employee then. The project was designed to peacefully resolve land disputes.

I advocated for and promoted the afore-mentioned attributes among disputants, for them to be able to end their disputants, both parties feeling winners.

I observed they succeeded in peacefully ending their disputes, disputants who managed to (1) be honest to each other, (2) deliver on their engagements, and (3) cease to treat the other party as not deserving fair treatment.

I remember one regrettable case in Rwinkwavu Sector in Kayonza. A woman was accusing her husband of extreme violence upon her. When she finished presenting her issue, I felt intense pity for her.

When the man justified himself, I experienced more intense pity since his explanations showed he’d been excessively victimized.

The couple didn’t have any point upon which they concurred. Their statements diverged totally. But one of them was dishonest. Though I couldn’t tell who was lying, I felt that the man wasn’t truthful.

I left the couple, but I attempted to investigate. The investigation corroborated my presentiment.?And I’d advised both of them but particularly the old man then in 2015 aged 64, to admit wrongdoing each side had committed.

I insisted to them that true reconciliation and peace-building really rest upon honesty. Yet, he didn’t budge and he instead pleaded guiltless. I warned him that he would regret, if his wife went to court for divorce.

My warning came true. After around one year the court ruled the divorce of the couple. The old man cried out to almost everyone for help but in vain. The last information about him nearly 3 years ago is that he was stagnating in bad living conditions; especially because of his advanced age and loneliness.

The wife, than whom the man was older by around 15 years, had adapted to life smoothly with her children.

Effective communication, active listening, humility, empathy- these attributes are also closely connected. Effective communication is ensured when the recipient of your message/information has understood it as exactly as you intended.

This entails active listening. “The roots of effective leadership lie in simple things, one of which is listening. Listening to someone demonstrates respect; it shows that you value their ideas and are willing to hear them,” John Baldoni.

Active listening includes listening with full attention and sincerity. One of the signs proving you’re listening to someone is to avoid distractions which could prevent you from listening with full attention.

As stated by the United States Institute of Peace, active listening is a way of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding, and it is an important first step to defuse the situation and seek solutions to problems.

The website, skillsyouneed.com, adds that active listening is to concentrate fully on what is being said rather than just passively hearing the message of the speaker.

It also says that active listening involves listening with all senses, whereby the listener also has to show verbal and non-verbal signs of listening. This website underlines that speakers generally want their listeners to demonstrate active listening by responding appropriately to what they are saying.

Some of appropriate responses to listening, according to the website, are smile, eye contact, nodding, or asking relevant questions.

In fact, communication must be open. To assure effective communication, one has to provide clear/precise messages/information with right channels and listen carefully. The leader and peacebuilder as well as parties in conflict must listen and examine details of information received.

A leader must possess peace-building or conflict transformation skills. The leader will find themselves in situations where they have to handle disputes or conflict. It suggests they have to capitalize on the above skills, to peacefully resolve them.

Humility, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, is the quality of not being proud because you are aware of bad qualities. When it comes to the leader, s/he has to remain aware that s/he can’t get solutions to all issues affecting an organization.

S/he instead has to listen carefully to others, and engage them to collectively handle the issues. It’s the same for disputants. To reach a solution beneficial for both/all parties, the role of each is paramount. No one has to feel they’re supreme to others.

Conflict often involves divergent opinions, goals, or values. On this point, it's advised to be convinced that your opinions aren't always better than others'. Even if they were, you could use your humility resource to convince people of your ideas.

This includes using persuasion techniques, instead of forcing people to agree about your viewpoints. Arguments, proofs, experiences or research can be some of those techniques.

Empathy involves putting yourself in others’ shoes. As a leader, be aware that you’re dealing with humans who share commonalities with you. They are sad, happy, angry, motivated, disappointed, and predisposed to wellbeing like you.

Both conflict parties must attempt to apply this attribute of empathy. You are a parent, and your opposing party is. There are numerous other commonalities which have to compel you to collaborate in efforts to get over the dispute, instead of continuing to destroy each other.

This mutual destruction benefits none of you. Your dispute can risk being cyclical. Today you can beat them, but tomorrow they can crush you. Personally I never imagined the Taliban could regain power 20 years after being overthrown.

The commonalities like blood bleeding, death, and interdependence are usually felt by parties taking time to think of the other party as one also suffering the negative consequences of violent conflict.

As a leader, you have to put yourself in place of your subordinates, while you’re dealing with them in any issues. When there is conflict and that you think it emanates from your subordinate, approach it in a way you wish it were, if it came from you.

To conclude, be aware that you’re contributing to building peace in your organization, program, project, especially if you’re a leader complying with the leadership qualities. The organizational peaceful environment, which will ensue, will benefit all organization stakeholders, particularly-you.

Take time to ruminate it or research on it, I’m sure you’ll corroborate me. Those are outstanding qualities which have to come from theory to practice in organizations, for them to be healthy.

Leaders must occupy a lion’s share in fostering those attributes. The most important action they have to perform in this regard is to be role models. They must demonstrate those attributes in all they do. In the next issue, we will focus on subordinates as this one has concentrated on leaders.

By Jean Baptiste Ndabananiye

Experienced Journalist with a demonstrated history of working in the broadcast media industry and peace-building. Skilled in English and French, M&E, Media Production,Peace-building, Leadership, and Marketing. Strong media and communication professional with a Bachelor's and Master's focused in Journalism& Communication and MBA-Project Management respectively from University of Rwanda and Mount Kenya University.

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