Integrity: When It Doesn't Sit Right

There’s a kind of conversation you can walk away from where everything you said was true and it still doesn’t sit right.

I’ve had one of those stick with me for a long time.

Back in 2015, I was the COO of a company, and one afternoon my boss, the founder and president, pulled me aside and let me know he had started the process of selling the business. He had engaged a broker, and things were already beginning to move behind the scenes.

There was one condition attached to that conversation. It had to stay quiet.

The reasoning made sense. If word got out too early, it could create fear inside the company and uncertainty outside of it. People would start filling in gaps with their own assumptions, and that rarely leads anywhere good.

So, for the next several months, a small group of us worked through the process quietly. We pulled together financials, answered questions, and met with potential buyers as interest started to build. From the outside, everything looked the same. Inside, we knew it wasn’t.

One night, around 10pm, my phone rang. It was one of our employees, and I could tell immediately something was off. He wasn’t calling casually. He had heard something, and it had gotten to him.

He told me he had picked up a rumor, from more than one place, that the company had been sold. And he asked me, directly, if it was true.

I remember that moment pretty clearly, because my first reaction wasn’t about the answer. There was something in my stomach before I even started forming a response. I noticed it and moved past it. Looking back, I shouldn’t have. 

I hadn’t really thought through what I would do if someone asked.  And now I was there.

Had the company been sold?

The honest answer to that question was no. There was nothing signed, nothing finalized, nothing that would make that statement accurate.

So that’s what I told him.

I told him the company had not been sold. I told him I didn’t know where the rumor had come from, and I reassured him that if something like that were to happen, he would hear it directly from us before hearing it through the rumor mill.

Everything I said was true.

And when the call ended, it didn’t feel that way.

I didn’t sleep much that night. Not because I thought I had done something wrong in a technical sense, but because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t been fully straight with him either.

I kept coming back to the same thought. I had answered the question he asked, but I had avoided the reality behind it. And even though that distinction made sense on paper, it didn’t sit well with me.

Somewhere along the way, I also found out where the rumor had come from.

It hadn’t come from the outside.

It had come from a few casual conversations my boss had with people in the industry. People who, as it turns out, were more than willing to pass it along.

Which meant the line I was trying to hold hadn’t been held as tightly as I thought.

The next morning, I went to my boss and told him what had happened. I walked him through the conversation and then told him where I had landed after sitting with it.

I told him that if I was ever asked a question that required me to say more than I had the night before, I wasn’t going to lie to protect the situation. I couldn’t do it. Not because I didn’t understand the reasoning behind the secrecy, but because I had spent too much time trying to earn trust from the people in that company to knowingly step outside of it.

To his credit, he understood. He told me he wouldn’t hold it against me if that situation came up, as long as I wasn’t volunteering information unnecessarily.

Over the next few months, no one asked me the question that would have forced that moment.

I was grateful for that.

But the situation had already done its work on me.

It made something clearer than it had been before.

For a long time, I had thought of integrity in terms of honesty. Say what’s true, don’t say what isn’t, and you’re on solid ground.

That experience showed me it’s not quite that simple.

You can stay inside the lines of truth and still feel out of alignment with it.

Not in a way that anyone else can necessarily point to, but in a way you can feel for yourself if you’re paying attention.

In the EPIC Compass, Integrity is less about the words you use and more about whether you are aligned with what you know to be true, even when the situation around you is complicated.

That’s where things tend to drift.

Not in obvious, dramatic ways, but in small adjustments that make a situation easier to manage in the moment. You tell yourself it’s temporary, or necessary, or the best option available given the circumstances.

Sometimes it is.

But even when it is, there’s still a question underneath it. Whether you’re fully aligned with what you’re doing, or just close enough to it to justify the decision.

That’s where Acceptance comes in.

Not as agreement, and not as approval, but as a willingness to see the situation as it actually is without trying to smooth the edges off of it.

For me, that moment wasn’t about changing the situation. The constraints were still there. The process was still moving forward.

What changed was my willingness to be honest with myself about where the line was for me, and what I would do if I found myself standing on it again.

That clarity didn’t make the situation easier, but it did make my footing inside of it a lot more certain.

I walked away from it knowing something I hadn’t been able to articulate before.

There’s a difference between answering the question that was asked and being aligned with what you know is true.

I stayed inside the lines that night.

But I felt the edge of them.

And once you feel that, it’s hard to ignore it the next time.

So it’s probably worth asking yourself something simple.

Where are you doing the same thing?

Where are you saying what’s technically true, but it still doesn’t sit right?