Post By: Adam Turteltaub

We all want honesty in our lives, and in our workplaces. It can make for all the difference on both a personal and professional level.

For Ron Carucci, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Navalent, discovering what led people to tell the truth and behave fairly became a mission. He analyzed over 3200 interviews that took place over fifteen years using Artificial Intelligence and identified four factors that correlated to whether people would behave honestly, which he defines as saying the right thing, doing the right thing and doing the right thing for the right reason.  The four factors he found are:

* Clear identity

Meeting the inherent promise of the values statement of the organization and ensuring actions don’t belie those words

* Accountability

Too often accountability has become a negative: scoring people against the wrong measures and putting them through an odious review process, which leads them to dishonest acts to avoid being penalized

* Governance

Here he means not board governance but organizational governance: how we make decisions, allocate resource and set priorities. It needs to be done in a transparent way with reliable data

* Cross-Functional Relationships

When the organization becomes fragmented and there are soon competing truths, conflicts go unresolved. The relationships need to be solid.

According to his research, get these four factors right and the organization is 16 times more likely to have people be honest.

Listen in to learn more a new way to think about creating a more honest organization.