Well being: True integrity has measurable value

UAE financiers are being presented with ethical dilemmas in a quiz from a financial services body that tests their integrity.

Mashreq took the integrity test in 2015. Satish Kumar / The National

If you found your competitor’s proposal for a project, would you use it to help your own project bid? That’s the kind of ethical dilemma behind an integrity quiz designed for financiers.

The Integrity Matters test is run by London-based financial services body the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment (Cisi). Since 2013, all 40,000 members, including bankers and traders, have been forced to take and pass the integrity screening within three months of joining or have their membership frozen. Before then, only financial advisers were required to take the quiz to maintain their Cisi status.

Now more than 300 Middle East members have taken the test; the first bank in the Middle East to take the test was Mashreq in 2015, followed by ADCB last year.

In the quiz – which anyone can sample in Cisi’s online integrity workshop – entrants are offered six of 15 ethical workplace dilemmas. These unfold in chapters based on your answers at each stage – like the old “choose your own adventure” books.

The pass score is 19/24 and the pass rate for the past year 88 per cent worldwide. With little financial knowledge – but clearly a high level of integrity - I achieved a score of 22 (92 per cent) in the 20-minute test.

So is integrity really so lacking at work? According to the most recent survey by the US Ethics Resource Center, workplace misconduct has hit a historic low. Yet worryingly, almost a quarter of the 6,000-plus respondents observed misdeeds involving senior managers and said 26 per cent of misconduct was ongoing in their company.

Many executives do not really know what integrity is, says Shane Phillips, chief executive of UAE-based management consultancy The Phillips Group. “Values are the basis of any great action in your career,” he says. “Integrity is when your actions match your values. Acting with integrity means making a decision based on principle, when the material benefits may be negative.”

And it is a quality worth looking for at work, he insists. “Integrity is the hand that shapes our values; through this process we become leaders. Integrity is the bedrock of leadership.”

q&a drive to end ‘casino banking’

Suzanne Locke offers more insight into the Integrity Matters test:

What’s the benefit of the Cisi test for members?

The move to make it compulsory for all members was to rid the financial industry of its poor reputation after the recession with a serious attempt to end “casino banking”. Entry-level candidates for the Cisi capital market qualifications must pass the exam, which counts for 1.5 hours of any annual CPD (continuing professional development) accreditation hours.

What happens if you lack integrity at work?

Shane Phillips, of The Phillips Group, paints a sad picture of executives without integrity. It weakens their values until they potentially have no “real value for anything”, he says. “Soon their life becomes bland and they become disenchanted, disconnected and even depressed.” Steve Jobs, he says, is someone whose value for programming shaped his life and was the “foundation stone of his success”.

How can we ensure our company operates with integrity?

Communicating internally about disciplinary actions and including ethics as a performance measure in staff evaluations are “two of the most powerful tools in effective ethics and compliance programmes”, according to the US Ethics Resource Center, which found 60 and 74 per cent of companies respectively used the two tools. “Companies are doing a better job of holding workers accountable, imposing discipline for misconduct, and letting it be known that bad behaviour is being punished,” its report says.

Can we assume more ethical companies have less misconduct?

Yes – an ethical culture, according to the ethics survey, drives employee conduct, with one in five workers seeing misconduct in companies where cultures are strong, compared to 88 per cent who witnessed wrongdoing in companies with the weakest cultures.

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