Simple honesty and integrity.

In Nigeria a number of banks have banking schools. I recall when my husband was accepted into the training school of one of them he talked about how even though there was a lot of focus on banking operations and finance for the 6 months he was there (yup 6 months long training school and it was called that – A training school!), there was a lot of focus equally on being honest and having integrity. My big brother is also a banker and her had to attend training school as well when he started out and he spoke about how some of his colleagues at that stage, ceased to be colleagues when they were caught out on things like lying on their cv or qualifications; cheating at a training school test; not wearing the appropriate attire etc. it felt like there was a lot of emphasis on what the behaviours were and less on how smart they were on sealing a deal.

Reading the news about the UBS scandal and the fact that there is a fear that this is not the end of it and there is still more to come, brings to mind these experiences that my brother and husband went through and I find myself wondering if the approach to preparing people for work needs to be seriously looked at and somewhere we need to talk plain and simple about good old honesty and integrity. Forget political correctness and the implications of philosophy, belief and culture – lets just talk about working in honesty and integrity.

There are some people that are ahead of me in this thinking, for years the Lagos business school incorporated a course of doing business in a corrupt environment – no flossing or dressing it up; just plain learning about how to navigate it and what you stand to loose when you don’t deal corruptly and what you stand to gain as well – your integrity and honesty. Perhaps that is an approach that needs to be looked at not just in the banking sector but in any place that releases the responsibility of lives into people’s hands. Weirdly enough the events at UBS proves my point. The trader initiated the deals that led to the losses, but till he owned up, they had NO CLUE what was happening. The perverse, cynical part of me thinks fear motivated him to speak, the opeful part of me wants to believe it was the little part of him that he had tuned off all this time that wanted to be heard – the honest part of him.