Noel Tichy: Leadership Starts With Integrity

Leadership guru Noel Tichy

At a time when many prominent graduate business programs are building into their curricula extensive focus on ethics, Wabash men got a quick course on leadership, integrity, and ethics from one of the nation’s leading experts on the subject, Noel Tichy.

"Leadership is the scarcest asset we have in the world right now," he said. "We have way too few leaders in business and politics today."

Tichy, who is professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at the University of Michigan School of Business, has written a dozen books on organizational leadership, including The Cycle of Leadership and The Leadership Engine. His visit to Wabash was sponsored by the Psychology Department and its honorary, Psi Chi, and was attended by about 100 students, faculty, and coaches.

"Part of why the US economy and the stock market are where they are is because we’ve had a bunch of crooks in some pretty important companies," Tichy said of the corporate scandals that have rocked the business world in the last two years.

"Business leaders are held with the lowest esteem ever in opinion polls, even below politicians and journalists," he joked. "I think this is a pretty big issue because you can’t have a free enterprise without integrity…If the guys are cooking the books and we can’t trust the numbers, you can’t have a free enterprise system."

Tichy earned his Ph.D. in social psychology at Columbia University, where he taught for nine years. He was later recruited by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch to transform GE’s education institute, Crotonville. It was there, in the mid-1980s, that Tichy turned Crotonville from a management center into a worldwide a leadership institute in which teachers and learners worked cooperatively to develop leadership skills.

"Any organization succeeds because it has leaders at every level," Tichy said of the ideas he formed in his work at Crotonville. "The more leaders you have at more levels the more successful you will be.

"The job of developing leaders is the job of the leader not consultants and professors," he says. "I want you to think about leadership as accomplishing something through other people that could not have happened without you. It starts with every one of us having a clear, teachable point of view on what your value system is. The most important part of the teachable point of view is getting clear on your values before you get into a tough situation."

In his lecture, Tichy pointed out examples of successful leaders, whose legacy is leading through others, and who are judged by their personal integrity and commitment to their communities.

Here’s a sample of the advice on leadership, values, and ethicshe gave to Wabash students:

"The only thing you can do is get a clear a clear grounding on your own personal value system before you get into a tough spot…You do the right thing because of your value system."

"Don’t ever forget, when you are a leader everything you do has a consequence for other people. And you better be clear on your values; you don’t want to be dealing with your value system when you get into a tough spot."

"Integrity. Without integrity you are dead as a leader…and it’s going to be true throughout your career."

"Show me a leader who makes change happen who wins a popularity contest early on and I will rewrite my 12 books, my 30 years of consulting, and my own leadership experience. It means having a set of values and a set of ideas that you believe in that start off putting you in the minority…If you are a change agent and make change happen, you’ve got to have the guts to live with it or worse."

"The one thing that (Jack) Welch did was that he taught every week. He would come to Crotonville and teach every week…It’s about believing that developing the next generation of leaders is a competitive advantage and then you change your time and spend your time doing it."

"How do you learn? You get a concept, you often get a benchmark, then you practice, and you get honest feedback. I don’t care whether it’s music, sports, getting your Ph.D., becoming a lawyer, that’s basically how you learn. This is what I call the virtuous teaching cycle where as teachers you also learn from the learner. I guarantee that if you think about the best teachers you’ve had in any sphere, they’ve been ones who have learned right along with you…We’ve got to create a continuous learning cycle where we teach, learn, teach, learn."

"While you’re in school, use it as a chance to keep working and refining your own teachable point of view. We don’t care if you come out of here with good grades in your economics class or your English class. What did you do to integrate that to be a better leader? That takes some work to articulate that and make it your own. Keep using your experiences here to work on your teamwork, leading through other people—it will be the one thing that will be the most significant factor in your education no matter what field you go into."