Episode 20

Hey, everybody, it's Rick Lewis. I'm back again with The Follow Through Formula Podcast. This is Episode 20.

I've spoken quite a number of times about the concept of integrity, what integrity is and why we need it for follow through. When we're aware of all the different parts of ourselves that might make different decisions at different times or behave in different ways under different circumstances, it's important that there's a form of consistent presence inside of us that allows us to show up and follow through with things that we've committed to, to honor previous alliances and allegiances we've made, and not give them up in a moment where it's inconvenient to stand for them.

Because I've been speaking about it quite conceptually, I decided I should share a few stories that came to mind today. The first story took place many years ago, when I was presenting at an event for the President's Club of a large company that was in the business of writing mortgages. This was just after the 2009 economic collapse that in large measure was triggered by housing loan shenanigans, we might say the bending and twisting of rules, so that a great deal of loans had been given out that should never have been issued. Many of you will remember that.

In attendance at the dinner were about sixty of the company's most successful sales-people, the backbone of the whole organization’s greatest profitability, plus their spouses. The whole evening was designed to be a celebration of these very high earners for the company. I had finished my presentation and was standing at the back of the room. It was towards the end of the evening, and they were going to move on to a D.J. and dancing. As I stood at the back of the room, the president of the company came forward to address these top performers.

I've done hundreds and hundreds of these kinds of events, and they follow a certain kind of formula, so I was expecting the stock speech from the president. “Thank you very much. You guys are all so wonderful. Tonight is to celebrate you, so have a great time and enjoy yourselves.” But this time, when the president started speaking, what he said took everyone by surprise. It was the last thing I or anybody in that audience expected to hear.

He began by saying how sobered he was to wake up each morning to the reality that his industry and his very own company had significantly contributed to the economic troubles that were now being faced by the entire nation. He detailed how his company had participated in the meltdown of banking institutions and previously stable financial structures by being lax and greedy in their business. He detailed his responsibility for the problem. He admitted his own personal mistakes, and he called for an immediate change in their corporate habits. He said, “The trust of our customers and the general public has been deservedly lost, and the vision of our company is to start tomorrow to earn it back by being trustworthy and reliable in our profession.”

It blew me away. I had never heard anything like this from an executive at an event, especially one to celebrate their sales success. Now, the result of what he was calling for would without question mean less cash to his organization. But his vision was focusing on another kind of profit. One ensuring a sustainable future and the value of being in integrity. I watched as he concluded his speech and walked off that stage to his seat.

The D. J. started playing music and the dance floor opened up, and it was very quiet for a while until the group finally broke into some quiet, low key socializing. Not a single employee got up or came forward to go over and acknowledge him, talk to him, or thank their president for speaking the truth, for leading the way to what would be a more responsible and probably, in the long run, a more sustainable future.

He demonstrated a very rare degree of courage. But there was no reward for it right there. There was no hooray, no standing ovation as there really should have been, no flurry of acknowledgement from all of these high earners who were going to have to shift their ways. It was going to mean a different financial future for them as well. This president just sat there alone with his wife at the table.

I couldn't get it out of my mind for months after. I kept thinking about his unusually honest and real address to them, and I was curious to find out what had happened after that. So finally, months later, I picked up the phone and called him. He told me that he had barely slept that night after his speech, worried that he had made a really big mistake by being so forthright and demanding with his team. He said the anxiety lasted for days, but then an amazing thing happened. He started getting phone calls, not from his employees, but from the spouses who were attending that dinner with their partners, thanking him for the stand he'd taken for the organization's integrity. He told me how deeply meaningful that was to him, knowing that he had the support of the families who stood behind his employees as they came to work every day.

That was really an extraordinary display of leadership. I haven’t seen many examples of that. He was a leader willing to guard the integrity of an organization with honesty and clarity, and willing to pay the price for doing it.

The second story is quite different. This one took place thirty or thirty-five years ago. I was living in the U. S. and I went to visit Vancouver, BC, to visit a friend. At that time, I was single and everything I owned fit inside my pick-up truck. This was also when I was first starting to perform street shows. There was a spot that I've talked about in some of the previous episodes called Granville Island Public Market, where you could just walk up and do street shows and pass a hat.

It was such a delightful scene, and I was developing my craft, so I hung around for a few months. I had not planned to stay long in Canada, but I wound up staying for months and supporting myself by street performing. After a number of months of being there, a woman who ran an entertainment agency saw me doing a street show and she really liked my performance. She wanted to get me hooked up with their agency so she could pitch me to some of their clients.

I went in, had an interview, we reviewed what my skill sets were and what kind of gigs they could pitch me for, and they were eager to offer my show to their clients. I told them I wasn’t yet legally allowed to work in Canada because I was just there as a visitor. So, they suggested I go back to the border to get a work permit.

In order to obtain a work permit you had to have a contract in hand from a Canadian organization, which this agency gave me. If you weren't taking away jobs from other Canadians, if your skills were unique enough and you had an actual job offer and a contract, you could get a work authorization. I scheduled a time to go to the border with this contract in hand and apply officially for a work authorization.

I got all the paperwork, took it with me to the immigration office, took a number and sat down to wait. There were maybe forty or fifty people in there. I waited for about forty-five minutes until I was called forward to one of the cubicles to speak to an immigration officer. I had my forms all filled out. I had the contract. I walked up. The immigration officer was standing there, a very nice woman, super pleasant. “How are you today?”  “I'm great.”  “What are you here to do?”  “Well, I'm here to get a work authorization.” She said, “Okay, do you have your paperwork?”  “Yep. Here it is.” I showed her the paperwork, and she pulled it over and started going through it.

She was chatting and being kind of social while she was going through the paperwork. She was saying, “Well, this looks good. This looks all in order. Everything's fine.” It was very light, very friendly chatter. And then she kind of glances up at me over the paperwork, and a strange sort of look crossed her face. She looked back down at the paperwork, and we were still talking, and she looked up at me again. But the look was a little bit longer.

I was thinking, “What is she seeing here in my documentation? Something must be amiss.” But she didn’t say anything about the documents, and she kept going back and forth between looking at the documents and looking at me. Her repartee with me was slowing down. It wasn’t so light and conversational anymore, and she was looking more anxious, even a little distraught, and she came to a stop and looking at me she said, “Do you perform at Granville Island?”

In this moment, there were about a million things going through my mind. I said, “Yes, I do,” knowing that was illegal. It was coins in a hat at that point, so it wasn't a huge deal, but technically what I was doing was not legal. Any kind of work in Canada without an actual permit to do that work was not legal, and here I was asking for a legal document from the government, saying I want to do the right thing, but I had already broken the immigration laws. Being an agent of those laws, she was standing there looking at me, having seen my show at Granville Island.

She told me later some of what was going through her mind. Not only had she seen my show, she had been there with her six-year-old son. And not only had they watched the show, but they had liked it so much that they had come up after the show, and I had engaged the kid by showing him how to juggle because he was really into it. I had even taken him for a ride on my unicycle. It had been this enormously positive experience for this kid, watching me gather five or six hundred people and do this amazing show which they just loved, and then getting to have this interaction with me after the show.

Now she was standing there looking at me, trying to decide what the heck to do. She said, “I saw you at Granville Island. I was the one who brought the young boy up that you took for a ride on the unicycle.” It came to me then. I remembered the interaction with her and her son. At that point, I was profusely sweating underneath my clothes. I had no idea what was going to happen. I thought maybe she was going call the RCMP over and have me locked up or thrown out of the country. I had no idea where this was going, and I don't think she did, either.

What a moment, to be an agent of immigration law who now had to weigh the significance of her sworn duty to that law simultaneous to the presence of human law. Reciprocal service law, connection law, decency law. What was she going to do? Throw this juggler out of the country for collecting some money in his hat after she and her son had so enjoyed their experience of what he had offered? It was a very natural connection.

She stood there staring at me. It felt like we were there for about two hours looking at each other, though it was probably more like 12 seconds. She was visibly distraught as she picked up the paperwork again. I could tell she had no idea how to proceed. Finally she said, “Wait here, I'll be back.” She walked away from the cubicle, and I could see through the glass windows to the back office as she went through the door to her office, sat down at her desk, put her hands up to her head, and leaned over the desk, looking at this paperwork.

She was there for 15 or 20 minutes. And I was standing there at the front, literally shaking with fear of what might happen next and what was going to come down. Eventually, she got up from her desk. She walked back out. She came to the cubicle. She put the paperwork down and she looked like she had just aged a couple of years in the 20 minutes that she was gone, she looked so harried and distraught and distressed. She put the paperwork down. She pulled out a stamp and she put a date stamp on it, indicating the expiry date of the work authorization. She signed it with her signature. She handed it to me, and she was not happy with me.

She was not happy about what she was doing, but she couldn't in her right mind penalize me for bringing joy to people, including her son. She handed me that work authorization and she said, “I never saw you.” I took it gratefully from her hand. I ran out of that immigration office with that thing in hand, shaking and trembling and sweating.

How's that for a story about integrity? Did she do the right thing? Did she follow through in a right way? Of course, there's no right answer to that. Some would say yes, absolutely, that was the right thing to do. Technically of course, there's no doubt some of her superiors would not have been happy with that decision and would not have considered it an act of integrity on her part.

Follow through is not always easy. Sometimes we are in very challenging circumstances and we have to make difficult decisions for which there isn't any one right answer. We have to trust ourselves, we have to make a decision, and we have to stand by it and move with it with commitment. I think the lesson here is that when it comes to follow through, we have to listen to ourselves. We have to trust ourselves, because we're the ones who have to live with the consequences of our decisions.

We are the ones who choose, and when we make choices that are best aligned with our character and who we want to be, we draw strength from following through even in difficult circumstances where there is no clear right or wrong answer. It builds character for us when we take a stand to do the thing that takes bravery, instead of just defaulting to what someone has told us we should do.

There you go. There's something to think about in terms of integrity, what it actually is and what it looks like. It is an important gift that comes from follow through. We will have to grapple with circumstances and situations that force us to question ourselves and to experiment in order to discover what integrity is in our case. These are points of choice from which we grow and progress, increasing our ability to follow through with more and more integrity.

I love that story. I haven't thought of that in quite some time, but it popped into my head today. Episode 20 in the bag and one more tomorrow to follow through on my commitment. And then, actually, I don't know what I'm going to do after Episode 21. It's quite something to be doing this every, it takes a good chunk of my day. But I've absolutely loved it so far, and we'll see what happens next. Thanks for listening again today, and I'll be back for my last day tomorrow. This has been Rick Lewis and The Follow Through Formula. Game on!