My word is my bond

Being true to your word is a powerful, yet highly subjective thing. Bill Macartney reflects on integrity and truth in business.

After recording more than 500 in-depth interviews with successful individuals I have come to see the enormous power of being true to your word. Not in the sense that God will smile upon you and send flowers, but rather in making you strong and in being respected and trusted.

I have also come to see that truth is a subjective thing. Five people can attend the same meeting and come away truly believing different versions of what was said or agreed. A very successful Mexican businessman became quite disturbed when members of his senior management team kept asserting that he was changing what had been agreed at meetings. He was puzzled to think they were right but smart enough to take it on board. They agreed that from then on, meetings would be tightly minuted. Equally, one of Australia’s greatest ever entrepreneurs is widely regarded as having kept a very loose grip on his word and yet he himself is absolutely convinced his word is 100% good.

This is due to what I have come to call the truth filter. I accept people’s word when they say they are committed to having integrity. I have found a need to understand why others in their lives question this – people like spouses, fellow business leaders, judges and former associates.

Entrepreneurs are particularly the focus of this theory. They build a dream and then draw that dream into their being like an anaconda draws in a wild boar. It becomes a part of them, a part of their DNA. In that process a filter develops, a filter that has as its purpose the propagation of the dream and the removal of anything that diminishes or threatens that dream. So from then on, if keeping their word will negatively impact or threaten the dream, the filter comes in and the truth shifts. But the perpetrator of this shift remains oblivious to it and totally convinced that their integrity is intact.

I don’t say this is a universal truth but rather an observation and a point of view. There are also obviously degrees to which the truth filter operates, in some cases, perhaps, not at all.

Virtually all of the people we have recorded for Cahoots confirm integrity as fundamental to the foundation on which their lives – or their businesses – have been built. And what a force it is. Great strength is needed to be, without backsliding, really good for our word. It forces us to be strong, and that strength transfers to all of our endeavours. I suspect, however, that many think there are levels of importance on word. If I say I will make the time to watch my son play football, it’s important and I must be there. But if someone rings when I’m busy and I don’t really want to talk to them anyway, I’m tempted to be nice and fob them off, saying I’ll call them back…. with no intention of doing so. In the second instance, I tell a lie and break my word but hey, it was only a little one. It’s like a spot of rust on a car: a sign of the breakdown to come.

My experience is that I am far more likely to get the call back from a business leader than, say, from a marketing manager. Indeed, as a species I would say that marketing managers are world champion backsliders under this definition and every time they don’t call back, the rust spreads.

The achievements we are most proud of are almost inevitably preceded by adversity, by having to fight for survival. It’s the joy – or otherwise – of discovering what one is truly made of.

Having integrity and being true to one’s word does make life tougher in the first instance, but over the passage of time it makes us strong,  builds respect (within and without) and keeps the rust at bay.