The Right Kind Of Success...Michelle Obama

"We learned about honesty and integrity - that the truth matters... that you don't take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules... and success doesn't count unless you earn it fair and square."

--Michelle Obama

Every other Tuesday, WOMEN AT LIBERTY presents Leadership Tuesdays, a platform for a variety of voices and resources to develop, encourage, and strengthen women leaders. From a very early age, our parents or guardians teach us the foundational principles of what's right and what's wrong. As we get older and begin to mature, we find out that life can present us with some situations where we have to decide whether we will compromise our values and do the easy thing or buckle down and do the work required to accomplish our goals.

Success, everybody wants to be successful. Everyone wants to be admired and respected by their peers, and more importantly, richly rewarded for their efforts.  The question is, is all success good success? If I don't play by the rules and no one finds out, does it really matter? What's fair to you, may not be fair to me. How do I really know what the right thing to do is?

Our Leadership Tuesdays' features today help us with just those questions. Michelle Freeman, CEO/President of the Carl Freeman Companies and the Freeman Foundations, tells us in a brief video snippet that sometimes when negotiating business deals involving large sums of money, we can be tempted to step "over the line" and take shortcuts to achieve our end goal. But, she says, "that might make it easier, but that does not make it better." 

In a blog entitled, "Ethical Behavior Coupled With Integrity"*, Dr. Surya Ganduri stated that research has "found that companies displaying a ‘clear commitment to ethical conduct’ consistently outperform companies that do not display ethical conduct". In the long run, it is more profitable to do the hard thing and achieve "good success" than it is to do what may be easier and achieve short term success that may cost the organization considerable more in the future.  As First Lady Michelle Obama says in the quote above, "success doesn't count unless you earn it fair and square". Dr. Ganduri's blog also offers five principles that will help leaders champion an organizational commitment to integrity.

To view the Michelle Freeman video snippet, click here.  To read the blog referenced above, visit the Women Making History Facebook page and click on the 3/25/14 posting.

*You can also view, "Ethical Behavior Coupled With Integrity", here: http://embcblog.blogspot.com/2013/08/ethical-behavior-coupled-with-integrity.html