Page 100 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

You Can Be Trusted • 81

3. Change the people.
4. Stay and suffer.

Burson-Marsteller polled 600 global executives and found that the
CEO’s reputation is worth at least half of the company’s reputation.
I’d say that same percentage holds true for a leader of any group. As
a leader in a position of power, you can have the temptation to step over
the line of ethical or legal behavior. Depending on how much control
and influence you have, no one is checking up on you. You can pull
strings. You’re at the top, and you see the loopholes. Being ambitious, you
want to achieve more, make more. You feel the competition breathing
down your neck, and sometimes you can be tempted not to follow your
own rules. What you’ll choose is your test of integrity.
A telemarketing company CEO sentenced to 18 years in federal
prison for mail fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering said,
“Any integrity that I had at that point in time went out the door. Gone. I
had embraced the illusion that nobody could touch me. I believed I was
invincible.”
It is human nature to be seriously tempted by greed and opportu-
nity, which sometimes leads to lying, stealing, and cheating. With 1 in
32 U.S. citizens in jail or on probation, according to Department of
Justice statistics, there is a good possibility that human nature won out
over a moral code of conduct.
That being said, the behavior needs to be pretty egregious to kill a
career that spans over 30 to 40 years. Martha Stewart was in jail and came
back. Bill Clinton was impeached and came back. Still, the reputation
you took years to build can be knocked down in days and even minutes
with such simple seemingly minor actions as tallying your golf score
deliberately incorrectly, or putting an inaccurate number of miles down
on your expense account.
If you’ve sidled off the path in the past, you can choose to be dif-
ferent going forward. Almost anything can be overcome.

CEOs like to play golf because the real character of a person
comes out. It’s only lore that decisions are made on the golf course,
except for decisions of character. There’s tons of golf etiquette that
points to character. For example, you don’t hold up the game if you’re