“Don’t give scandal!”

Growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Canada, this was one of the teachings drilled into me. For the non-Catholics reading this: scandal can be understood as either an action or an omission that leads another to sin or moral error. To give scandal was a grave sin.

This made my teenage years tricky as I spent so much of my time thinking about what I could do to experience sin and moral error.

It is something that I have often thought I had let go of, (the belief, not the moral error), yet the concept of scandal still raises its judging head with me.

It can also come up for my clients, particularly when issues of reputation and integrity are on the table.

How can we distinguish between scandal, reputation and integrity? And how do they relate to one another?

📍 Reputation arises from others’ perceptions of your character or behaviour, whereas

📍 Integrity rests on the consistency between your values, actions, and words.

📍 Scandal worries about spiritual harm to others and is an issue of moral influence.

Reputation concerns itself with our public image and social perception. Integrity concerns itself with inner moral alignment and personal ethics.Scandal is judged externally by Church teaching and internally by conscience, and breaches create spiritual damage and are considered sin.

Reputation is relational and is judged externally, by society, media, or stakeholders, with breaches leading to a loss of trust or status.
Integrity is internally assessed by self, or externally by people who are personally or professionally close to us, and breaches lead to internal cognitive dissonance or external loss of trust.

🎯 Where reputation emerges most strongly in a leadership context is a fear of developing a reputation for something which might clash with social or organisational norms and how I need to be seen by others in order to be accepted and respected, or in other words, to be safe.

The fear of reputational damage is a valid one. Reputation matters. Trust and our social influence are a function of our reputations. How we deal with risks or threats to them is a critical key question for leaders.

However, our fear of losing our good reputation often leads us to reactive behaviour.

🤔 “Will moving towards, away from or against someone or something restore the safety I crave?” is a question that leaders wrestle with. Yet the more important question is often:

🤔 “How can I respond to this situation with integrity?” This question shifts the focus from the external to the internal, from the reactive victim to the creative leader.

What often makes this hard is the deep rooted beliefs which we absorbed from our elders when we were young. And which likely continue to influence our thinking and behaviour long after we thought them removed.

How or where are you wrestling with the tension between reputation and integrity?

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash