Usually we associate hard work and great skills, or competence, with big success. But you and I both know people that work hard and are incredibly talented, but who always seem to fall short of their full potential. Why is that?

It’s because there’s something else that is truly the lynchpin of great, long lasting success. There’s something even more important that prevents people from tripping up or fizzling out, but it’s missing in their case.

Here are some questions that will help us move closer to the answer:

• How do you respond when things around you are falling apart?
• How do you handle it when others give you feedback on how you can improve your performance?
• When was the last time you made a significant personal sacrifice for the good of the team?

All of these questions speak to the issue of character. In last week’s post I began sharing with you the qualities of people who possess a fully integrated character. In other words, these qualities represent what it means to truly be a person of integrity.

We typically associate honesty and follow-through with the word integrity. But it’s much more than that. Last week I shared with you the first three qualities from Dr. Henry Cloud’s best-selling book, Integrity. This week I’m going to share the other three.

Picking Up Where We Left Off

Here are the final three character qualities that define a person of integrity according to Dr. Cloud. Together, these six qualities (read last week’s post for the first three), combined with hard work and top notch skills, will position you to be truly successful.

None of these explanations are exhaustive. But they give you a solid sense of what the author is talking about. Check out the book for a deeper study.

4. The ability to embrace, engage, and deal with the negative. We are all going to encounter failure or significant difficulty, no matter how talented we are. People of mature character endure and are resilient. They walk through these situations with a healthy attitude that breathes life and hope into others around them.

Part of the reason they are resilient is because they don’t get their sense of identity from the work they do. They bring their identity to bear on their work, not the reverse. This allows them to maintain a healthy level of separation between their own sense of worth and the results they produce.

Hand in hand with this, they are willing and able to take full ownership of the work they do and the work their teams produce. They do not pass the buck or get into the blame game. When something goes awry they step into it, own it, and correct it to the degree possible.

5. The ability to be oriented toward growth. This one resonates with me deeply because Learner is one of my talent themes from the Gallup StrengthsFinder. This speaks to that inner drive toward learning and developing. There’s a sense in which they cannot not grow. It’s a normal, natural consequence of engaging in the day.

This shows up in a few different ways. First, it involves getting outside input. Those who exhibit this quality not only welcome outside input, they crave and seek it out. They know they have blind spots and want them identified so they can be overcome.

I used to give my staff an annual, confidential evaluation form and asked for them to grade me on how well I was managing them. I never saw their forms. They went straight to HR who compiled the trends and themes for me. I learned a lot about myself from this. My other favorite was a 360 evaluation I participated in that literally changed the whole course of my career because of the changes I made from the feedback I was provided.

This also has to do with an inclination toward challenging the status quo. There is much more to say about this, but suffice it to say that a continuous improvement mindset and a willingness take risks is normal.

6. The ability to be transcendent. In Jim Collins best-selling book, Good to Great, he said that all of the leaders of the great companies shared a couple of things in common. One of them was an extreme personal humility.

In trying to give an example that would quickly allow his readers to connect with his point, Collins referred to Abraham Lincoln “who never let his ego get in the way of his primary ambition for the larger cause of an enduring great nation.” The grasping of a larger cause is a big part of this quality.

These people have a clear sense that there is something bigger and larger than themselves and they don’t let their own self-interests, or that of those on their team, to get in the way of it. Dr. Cloud describes it as a willingness to bow to the larger thing.

They are willing to make significant personal sacrifices and adjust their own attitudes and ambitions to accommodate that which is of more value, or the greater good.