Lee Shares Intimate Details about Guarding Your Character – See Inside

Click the book to learn more about Lee Ellis’ award-winning book, Leading with Honor.

In this Leading with Honor excerpt, Lee shares some very intimate points about the leadership principle of “Guarding Your Character” – please read and share –

“What causes one person to abandon his commitments even before he’s seriously tested, and another to keep his commitments nearly to the point of death? I’m quite certain both Fisher and Minter would say they were men of high integrity, but obviously they had vastly different views of what integrity means. One had real clarity about his values and a very strong commitment to keep them. The other was committed to his values as long as keeping them was convenient. When the going got tough, he found it easy to rationalize his way around his values by saying that war had never been declared.

Often people ask me why the Vietnamese so readily resorted to torture. My answer is that the communist system is founded on the belief that the end justifies the means. When they tortured half the guys in my camp to try to force them to sign public statements saying they had received “humane treatment,” they saw no disconnect, because their concept of truth was derived from their ideology, not the other way around. Their allegiance was to the party line, not to real truth. In fact, one of the interrogators told us that ‘truth is that which most benefits the party.’ A system based on such a significant flaw regarding integrity and honor can only survive on power and fear, reinforced by constant misinformation.

Unfortunately, this same ‘end-justifies-the-means’ mentality is becoming increasingly prevalent in our American culture. Business leaders are far too willing to cut corners to advance their organizations’ goals and their own careers. Greed is rampant on Wall Street. Politicians regularly make statements they know aren’t totally true and issue promises they don’t intend to keep. Confidence in the accuracy of media reporting is at an all-time low. To make matters worse, the rest of the citizenry are more and more inclined to excuse such behaviors as ‘the way things are done these days.’ We should expect our leaders and institutions to tell the truth, keep commitments, and consistently walk their talk. We must hold leaders accountable to lead with honor, and we should start with ourselves.”

(This article is an excerpt Chapter 2 of Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton.)