In my previous post I discussed ten principles of effective leadership. I want to expand a bit on the last step, living with integrity. Doug discussed six key steps to living with integrity and suggested we go through the list weekly to assess our progress.

1. Reconnect to your mission, vision and values: Re-read your mission statement (step 5) and gauge your progress based your recent activities and actions.

2. Review roles and responsibilities: Review the different roles that make up your persona (e.g. professional, familial, spiritual, etc.) and assess how you are doing in each.

3. Decide what is important: You will always have more to do than time to do it. Choose the things that are most important to you and give them your focus.

4. Write it down: Write down your list of important activities and post it in a prominent place (such as on your bathroom mirror).

5. Be strong in the moment of choice: There’s always the temptation to avoid difficult responsibilities or activities that make us feel uncomfortable. When you find yourself in such a moment, do the right thing; be committed to what you know is most important.

6. Course correct as needed: When you find yourself out of integrity, make changes to get back on course.

The definition Wikipedia gives for integrity begins with: “Integrity is the basing of one’s actions on an internally consistent framework of principles.” These keys will help us define our own framework and give us the internal strength to be better people and therefore better leaders.