The Cost - and Call - of Integrity
Welcome to The Integrity Practice: Lived, Messy, Human and Rooted in Justice.
Getting the story straight
And finally, we are off with Substack. I’ve been hesitant about bringing an additional tech platform into my life, at a time when I’m trying to simplify life and get back to more analogue connections with folk.
When I set this page up back in March, I began with the title' How to live a vital life’. Vitality, in its core meaning, refers to the quality of being fully alive in all aspects of one's self. I had envisaged it as more of a personal space to unpack ideas about living in alignment with values, connecting to sources of energy and inspiration, and as a tool for personal resilience. In honesty, it was more for me than for you!
But as time passed, I realised that this framing wasn’t quite right for what I felt called to write and share about. It didn’t make enough space to be with the messiness, the complexity or the grief we’re experiencing. I didn’t want to separate personal from professional - I wanted a place to write as a human, thinking about what’s happening outside the world and how it impacts the inside of our organisations. I also realised I was looking for more community with people who care about showing up to their lives and leadership with integrity.
So here we are - welcome to The Integrity Practice.
This is a space for people who see integrity as something we practice. It’s not a destination that is reached. New scenarios constantly surface that challenge ethics and integrity, and these need to be navigated. The societal context of what is seen as behaving in and out of integrity also shifts and morphs, and what is accepted as ethical in one period of time isn’t in another. Practice means it’s imperfect; we’re all students or apprentices, although some might bring more experience or expertise than others. It takes time, patience and intentionality. This is a place for all of this.
My integrity story
I’ve been thinking about integrity and ethics in the workplace for a long time.
The reality of integrity being more than a value one claims to hold came into sharp view when I burned out 10 years ago. The dissonance between the values I was trying to live and the organisational practices I was asked to uphold became too much, and as a senior leader, I imploded. But it was also connected to being personally unable to hold a widening gap between a working life of developing strategies for brands whose products or services were reinforcing mindless consumerism, unsustainable practice, led usually by teams of white Western men who didn’t particularly care about EDI unless they saw those communities as dollar signs.
So I retrained and became an organisational change consultant working with leaders on building purposeful cultures. But here I saw that so much of culture and leadership work was at the level of the façade. So much talk about values, vision, and purpose while workforces were burning out, tensions and organisational wounds were ignored or buried, dysfunctional leaders weren’t challenged to evolve, and no one was doing anything about diversity or representation. There was sometimes a gaping divide between who organisations say they are and who they actually are. Oftentimes, putting more energy into hiding or disguising this reality than into doing the actual work.
This disconnect between the inside and outside was a problem I wanted to address. Its impact on people, wellbeing, equity, and accountability became my focus.
It wasn’t long after this that I set up New Ways. I wanted to break leaders' silence on racism in the moment that followed George Floyd’s murder, so I created a course called "How to Talk about Race at Work”. As a brown woman with Jamaican heritage, I have long believed that anti-racism isn’t only a moral imperative, it is good business practice. When we have structures, practices, behaviours and a mindset that unpicks supremacist and colonial ways, we have an imaginative, free and inspiring place to work where people and organisations thrive. And as the business grew from this programme into a bespoke consultancy, I could fully focus on showing up with integrity for organisations that cared about leading and being better.
The integrity call
So here we are today in 2025, where our integrity challenge feels more pertinent than ever. Authoritarianism, rise of fascism and racism, accountability as a shadow of its former self, growing inequalities and systemic inequity in most of our systems. The awakening to who we really are is setting in for those in the Global North as the Global South are raising their voices and rightly so. The integrity gap feels like it’s getting bigger and deeper every week, revealing a new crack to heal.
It can feel overwhelming, especially when we try to navigate this alone. But it is a moment to ask new questions about what it really means to lead with integrity. What does that look like in our lives, communities, leaders and organisations?
In my life and work on equity, belonging and anti-racism, leading with integrity is something I don’t always find easy, but it’s a path I won’t stray from. I want to bring about the best we can offer to one another as humans, as a diverse group of people coming together to make positive change for society.
It often means having challenging conversations or taking risks to stand up for people or ideas, both in and out of work. It sometimes means learning out loud to invite discussion and encourage others to think about their choices and decisions. It involves navigating when to walk away and what to say no to. It inevitably means learning from mistakes, dealing with ruptures, and finding ways to repair in relationships. It means being honest about when my own right to comfort overshadows bringing integrity. It needs alot of compassion because at the root of integrity is honesty - truly naming our reality with a readiness to face contradictions or tensions.
Integrity Practice isn’t theory. It’s lived, messy, human, and deeply tied to justice. In this space, there isn’t a capitalist separation of the personal and professional, politics is part of the integrity story. We start by seeing systems change being enabled by relational change - how we relate to ourselves and others. We sharpen discernment on ethics in practice, staying attuned to what we care about, what we stand for and stand up for, and the change we can make from exactly where we are to resolve dissonance.
I believe it’s the only path worth walking. I want this space to be where I can connect to others who wish to be on that path, starting from wherever they are, but equally seeking to bring more vitality into life, leadership and work. Where our actions, choices, and values are aligned, not just in our personal lives but also in our working lives. When we can show up with courage and creativity rather than numbing ourselves or pushing through on autopilot. When efforts around justice, anti-racism and power don’t just “solve problems”, they open up space for organisations to move beyond control, silence, and placation into ways of working that are creative, courageous, accountable and life-giving for everyone involved.
If this sounds like a space for you, then welcome aboard. Here I'll share musings and reflections from all aspects of life and work. Offer insights on where I see integrity being modelled well and where we can learn from mistakes. It will be a thinking space for integrity challenges I’m wrestling with and a window into how we navigate this as a business and with our clients, too. I’m not committing to a post frequency, but I have a lot to say about this right now, and LinkedIn is feeling less and less like my place, so who knows!
Signing off now as I’m off this morning to a writing workshop with the very appropriate title of Radical Acceptance. It all starts there.