Leadership 100

Brad Filepas

LEAD100

Professor Jane Case

March 7th, 2013

Personal Integrity Paper

Upon signing up for Leadership 100 and noticing the official title of the course, “LEAD100: Leadership, Integrity, and Change”, I had a feeling that integrity was going to play a large role throughout the course. To me, integrity means many things. But above all, I associate integrity with honesty and truthfulness. In my eyes, the person that has integrity is the person who is genuine, honest, and truthful. If a person is sneaky or beats around the bush or tells subtle lies, that person does not possess integrity in my opinion.

Furthermore, integrity means being ethical to me. In business for example, if you are the manager of a business and you do not display adequate business ethics, then you do not have integrity. In order to have integrity, one must be honest and genuine in any given scenario. One person that I recently saw who displayed a very high amount of integrity was Wes Moore. During the telling of his life story, he had the audience completely under a trance. He was one of the most genuine people I have ever heard speak. He seemed very honest and down to earth throughout the evening, and had an amazing amount of character. During his story, you could almost feel what he was saying, you could tell that he overcame so much and went on to do such great things. Wes had a very high amount of integrity, his morals were good, his principles were good, and he was honest, genuine, and virtuous. After listening to him speak about his life, I closely associate him with integrity.

Integrity to me simply means being able to lead a group of people by being honest and genuine. Take Abraham Lincoln for example, “Honest Abe” as people called him. He was always genuine and honest in his speeches, and he always spoke his mind, even if it made him unpopular. He abolished slavery even though a lot of Americans disagreed with him. A president without integrity would just say whatever...