Investing in integrity: it's not as easy as it sounds, but it's worth the work.

It's now three years since Hospira, the company I am privileged to lead, spun off from Abbott Laboratories. During those three years, we have done some things wrong, and more right, I hope, in growing our specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery business into an independent, publicly held, global concern.

But no decision has been more right than our decision to establish integrity as a key value. We made that decision early on, before we even knew our company's name. I remember vividly the employee meeting where we announced our plans for the new company. The anxiety level was high, and my inability to answer many questions probably ratcheted it higher; however, I was able to be clear about our key values: speed and integrity. Speed, because we knew we had to better anticipate customer needs and get new products to market faster if we wanted to survive. Integrity, because, corny as it may sound, we believed in it.

Since then, integrity has helped give our employees a compass for their conduct and a sense of pride that served us well in many ways--even when it required short-term sacrifices.

To be serious about integrity, companies need to make it a part of their culture top to bottom. Everybody--not just the ethics officer--needs to feel empowered to make his or her own ethical judgments and speak up when appropriate. Obviously, this can be a formula for more management headaches, but managers need to welcome those as a sign of higher-level organizational health.

Managers also need to understand that the only thing worse than a lack of integrity is a hypocritical lack of integrity. They need to walk the talk.

At Hospira, we've had at least two outstanding examples. First, an executive protested when he realized his bonus had been miscalculated; it was too high. Second, a product we had contracted to sell to a big customer was not going to be ready in time. Instead of trying to manage the customer through delays, we made prompt disclosure. The consequence? We lost the business, but it showed that we took integrity seriously. We recouped the business when our competitor later ran into its own problem.

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Integrity also has to be spelled out. There are limits to how specific you can get, but you can delineate the concept so that employees can think through problems with integrity as their screen.

On the day we launched Hospira, we began educating our employees by giving them all a book--The Integrity Advantage by Adrian Gostick and Dana Telford--that explains integrity in a corporate setting. It boils integrity down to 10 characteristics, which it then defines. Among my favorites:

* You know the little things count.

* You mess up, you 'fess up.

* You keep your word.

* You care about the greater good.

* You act like you're being watched.

* You hire integrity.

We also used this book as the inspiration for an employee Code of Business Conduct, which we distributed to all 14,000-plus employees. We followed up with live training sessions, and we asked everyone to sign a "Statement of Ethics and Compliance." Finally, we set up a worldwide Ethics and Compliance Hotline.

As 2004 ended, we conducted an employee benchmark survey. It found that just 24 percent of respondents would "strongly agree" that they were encouraged to act with integrity. Just 22 percent felt their managers set an example of integrity.

Late last year, we repeated the survey. This time, the relevant percentages were 67 percent and 62 percent, respectively. I take heart that we're on a constructive path and that our education and training, as well as our actions, have helped put us there. For the sake of Corporate America, I hope we can all be on that path together.

Christopher B. Begley is CEO and director of Hospira, a global specialty pharmaceutical and medication delivery company based in Lake Forest, III.