Importance Of Integrity In The Military

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For those of you who don’t know… I’m a bit partial to the military. Aside from the obvious awesome stuff, what draws me particularly is the Core Values of the Air Force. I would like to share with you what they mean to me, and how we can use them to have better Air Force days. The first and most important core value the Air Force teaches is “Integrity First.” If I asked most people what integrity is they would answer with the classic response of “Doing the right thing when nobody's looking.” I’d like to go more in depth with what that means to me. Trust is the foundation of teamwork, whether it’s the military or something as simple as a high school group project. The reason trust and integrity and loyalty are always first on the list of values of any organization is that without trust, your team has nothing to stand on. If your …show more content…

But there are ways we can improve our concept of integrity, so we can form stronger teams and build better relationships. My patent pending formula to building better integrity is this: nothing is too small to tell the truth about. I’m sure we’ve all done this: Mom walks in and asks if we’re done with homework. There’s papers and books strewn about the room and we just started cramming for the test tomorrow. What’s our answer? “Yep, just a couple more problems.” This is an example of a “Little white lie.” Ok, so maybe it might seem like it hurts nobody, just as it might with a small little detail on a team project. And maybe you have made some pretty good progress on homework. But oh no-- Mom just threw on a bunch of chores since we’ve clearly got homework under control. Now you have to pick one or the other, and who do you want to let down? This could have been avoided if we were honest with our mom (the boss and team leader) and if we were honest with ourselves. So the key to maintaining trust in a team and integrity is to be honest with even the smallest of

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