Integrity is Key to Exceeding Expectations

“We simply paint humanity as we find it, as it is. We say let all be made known in order that all may be healed.” Emile Zola

In “The Need for Integrity”, Zola describes how in becoming a novel writer one must first cast off those phoney deceitful selves, those superficialities that people carry around to mask the pain or fear of reality. Zola describes these altered states as being a menace to personal “happy” relationships.

As Peterson and Waterman alluded to in their all-time international top ten bestsellers “In Search of Excellence“, America’s leading companies key to success is as simple as delivering on brand promise”.

Integrity

Wikipedia defines integrity as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, moral uprightness, and integrity is the inner sense of “wholeness” deriving from qualities such as honesty and consistency of character.

Integrity is the “concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes.”

How Zola portrays the average human is how Peterson and Waterman spoke about the roots to why so many failing businesses, those who purport to offer plenty but deliver on nothing but mere scraps, are simply providing a delusional front; they lack honesty, they have no values and offer but credulity.

Personal reflection

In the late nineties, a friend and I were drafted to work at one of Australia’s busiest fast food stores. The store had seen way better times and when we arrived it was dirty and run down, the staff (80+) had become lazy and disengaged, and the sales were reflective of the overall poor attitude; well below expectations for a prime city centre store.

We closed the store down for a few weeks to allow us to clean and renovate and also re-interview all the staff for their positions. Sadly, previous poor management had led to poor hiring so many of the original staff were let go, including managers.

We both stayed at this store a total of three months, and in those three months we’d given the place a facelift, we’d hired and trained over 50 new staff and we’d accomplished our goal in making this store the flagship store it should have always been, plus we officially doubled the weekly sales. In realistic terms though, all we actually needed to do, which we succeeded in doing, was to give back the store’s integrity, its ability to deliver on its international brand promise.

Within a few months, my friend and I were both headhunted and moved over to the competitor, the worlds leading Fast Food Company. He is still there to this day.

Low Expectations

If you’re in the majority, then like the rest of us you’ve had to wait for something today. You may have waited in line at your favourite coffee shop on your way to work, yes well worth the wait, but you may also have encountered waiting for the train (late again) to get you to the coffee shop, waiting at the ticket machine (queues) to get a ticket for the train, waited on the phone to pay a bill before you left home in the morning.

We all wait for most of the things we need to do, or if they’re things we have to do, such as pay bills (queues), then it’s simply expected of us to wait longer than usual. None of us like waiting, that’s what adds to the frustrations that make our normal mundane lives less bearable.

It’s this high tolerance, poor daily expectations way of living that we’ve all become accustomed to, and as Zola says we make shit up just to make it better. We’re trying to avoid the low expectations we already have and create our personal barriers to reality.

Suppliers are prone to poor delivery

Peterson and Waterman say 99% of all business managers lack integrity, this transpires to how the public perceives you as a brand.

I’ve just finished ten years working in state government delivering digital projects as a senior digital producer and UX’er. A decade has taught me a lot about the landscape of digital and the suppliers working in this area.

Our department (Marketing and Communications) was extremely busy at all times working on at least six major projects annually, with two or three projects running at any given time.

I found our projects were forever grinding to a halt due to poor suppliers and their broken promises; a project manager didn’t call us and now that new day is Monday instead of Friday as WE promised OUR stakeholders, and now Friday after-work drinks have all gone flat. Yet that promise of Monday needs to be pushed back a few more days because!

Really, who gives a toss about excuses? They’re just broken promises that prove your brand has no integrity, and in reality, your business should remove itself from offering any further stuff-ups to other peoples important campaigns.

I think business to business supply goes defunct as often as the business to consumer, and it always comes down to the same issue, over promise, under deliver.

My moral compass as a UX designer

As a UX designer and an individual, the whole sad moral fact of this article is: Almost every one of us has extremely low expectations of almost everything we have to do (not what we chose to do), yet most businesses we deal with simply fail to understand that all it takes to be successful, is to deliver on the promise made to us.

I find it remarkable how twenty years ago I was helping a global fast-food giant regain its integrity in Australia’s second largest city, and here I am today, after a dozen other career paths, back helping businesses connect with customers and looking for the best way I can instil that sense of integrity.

Personally, as a User Experience Practitioner, I believe it’s my duty to deliver on promises made to our users, and we should aspire to build on integrity in every action we take and every product we build.

Integrity is simple: Do what we say, and deliver what we promise.

By delivering brand promise and by simply upholding our integrity, then we will always exceed all expectations.