Last year, Boeing agreed to pay up to $72 million, to settle a class action sex discrimination lawsuit. Around the same time as the Boeing settlement, Franklin Templeton Investments admitted to allowing trading practices that favored well-heeled clients over other investors. At the beginning of this year, the news regarding Fannie Mae's overstatement of earnings by $9 billion dollars continued to be reported. At times, it seems as if there will be no end to corporate scandal and wrong-doing.

When issues, such as those just reported, are settled by the parties in the legal process, language is frequently included to assert that the corporation "neither admits nor denies" misconduct. You can intuit the benefits to corporate officers by neither admitting nor denying misconduct. In other words, it raises a more common question: What can I get away with?

While few of us will ever face incidents of similar magnitude, integrity and ethics are regularly challenged -- and developed in the world of work. Personal and organizational integrity is earned when leaders make critical decisions concerning customers, employees, and shareholders. If personal agendas rule the day, self-interest is king. When self-interest works to the disadvantage of the organization, the exercise of leadership fails. Self-interest over service degrades the organization's aspirations and purposes.

A task of leadership is to find common ground with others, even when the interests of others appear completely polarized. The ability to work this common ground is a call to a higher purpose - service to the organizational mission. It calls the leader to ask, "What's the right thing to do?" When an individual chooses the higher purpose over self-interest, he or she is operating in service of others.

Many of you have probably seen Martin Scorsese's new film, The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It's the story of Howard Hughes, who is described (according to a recent headline article in Business Week) as the "world's oddest boss." Hughes' successes in business - and his eccentricities - are legendary. As a demonstration of his eccentricities, at one stage of life, Hughes' diet consisted solely of milk. It doesn't seem like an approach that could sustain leadership for the long haul! Today's on-demand environment requires that every leader have an approach to work-life blend and wellness.

By nature, C-level leaders are often very "certain" of themselves. We need and want them to be decisive and to use that decisiveness in the service of good decisions. However, these same leaders face an "uncertainty" crisis when they get bad news, particularly when that new is related to declining health and wellness. The uncertainty crisis creates a new learning opportunity that only some are able to seize. What is the new learning opportunity? The new skill is "knowing where to turn." This skill differs significantly from others related to resource utilization - it requires a deeper sense of self. When this skill is lacking, elements of the new situation may magnify and contribute to a loss of executive balance.

To lead well, we need to have process of discovering and identifying health opportunities. Work in this arena springs from our understanding of what it means to learn and to change. As you move forward with an approach, consider two strategies: 1) what do you need to add, and 2) what do you need to lose? These simple strategies often move people from wishful thinking and to determined outcomes and choices. In the work we've done with thousands of individuals over the years, we've observed that many are more adept at stripping away behaviors than with skill accretion.

Economic conditions may have little relevance to an organization's waistline, measured by total employee complement. Organizational downsizings affect size, and we are as likely to experience them in good economic times as we are in deteriorating economic conditions. Today, we are in the grips of a new organizational phenomenon: churn. Churn is the process of release, retain, and recruit. One portion of the organization may grow while another declines - and churn can even occur on an intradepartmental basis as a group re-skills to meet real, emergent, or perceived needs. Churn was ignited, and now fueled, by hyper-competition on a global scale.

A new measure of success for business leaders is to understand the profound impact of churn on organizational capability and performance. Too often, in the day-to-day pace of operations, managers are concerned with "getting-through." That means getting-through the current or next round of lay offs, or getting through the approval processes to hire necessary talent. In all of this getting-through, it's easy to miss the process of churn from a cognitive aspect; emotion overcomes cognition.

We've even attempted to fool ourselves by adding and modifying the lexicon of employee termination. A flagrant example of this new math is the term employee optimization. It defies logic (that an organization can get this right) and contributes to the recent trend of employee opinion expressing a lack of confidence in senior management. Does anyone know where we are going? It's a question that stems from churn.

As churn persists, leaders must do a different job with the process. Today, talent is increasingly selective - as a result of spiraling reports of boardroom scandal and the routine "best of" reporting. Increased selectiveness creates a leadership opportunity to successfully understand and to manage this process of churn. If an organization regards its retention practices as "programs" or "policies," it will fail to realize the potential associated with active and ongoing talent development that produces important organizational results.

Organizations desiring to be at the leading edge of retention adopt a new mandate that blends statistical analysis and key insight into the value proposition of individual talent. As a result, these organizations are able to stem a potential tide of unwanted talent defection. Understanding and managing this process with thoughtfulness contributes to both community well-being and the bottom line.

The magazine executive and chronicle of capitalism, Malcolm S. Forbes, observed that "Presence is more than just being there." Forbes' observation relates well to the topic of leadership and love, two topics that at first glance are seemingly unrelated. History, however, establishes that the greatest leaders are those who have led with love, not force.

In today's environment, with a host of ills -- including bigotry, deception, greed, and self interest - leaders who show love are needed. Leaders will bring out the best in themselves and others, supporting a climate of change and learning. One sure way of "reaching" others is through acts and behaviors that encourage the heart.

As you review your actions, and your leadership development planning, how are you encouraging the heart? Here are five considerations to encourage heartfelt work in leadership:

• Be passionate about what you do. If you can't find excitement and passion in what you're doing, consider how you're living out your purpose.
• Discover your voice. Get comfortable in your own skin to encourage the alignment of the personal and the professional.
• Dedicate yourself to something larger than yourself. You'll find that it opens even hardened hearts.
• Get some feedback on you demonstrate respect for others. Get in touch with what it means to have deep and abiding respect for human achievement.
• Get beyond the mentoring "program," and commit to the personal and professional development of another.

As we move through the remainder of 2005, consider what you can do to live out any of these five considerations. At the end of the year, you will have brought yourself, and your organization, closer to the goal of becoming "better."