Corporate Integrity as an antidote to toxic culture

Corporate Integrity as an antidote to toxic culture

What Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance mission teaches modern leaders about trust, fear, and decision quality.

Corporate integrity is not a slogan. It is a system. Learn how values, incentives, and leadership behaviours prevent toxic culture and protect trust.

The uncomfortable truth about “high performance”

Many organisations look successful from the outside. Q4 is up over last year. Clients seem satisfied. The leadership team is busy implementing the latest version of “Strategy”. The dashboards are green.

And yet inside the system, something is quietly degrading.

• People stop telling the truth early.

• Ethical shortcuts become “pragmatic decisions.”

• Leadership presence becomes performative.

• Fear replaces candour.

• Culture survey results seem surprising.

This is how toxic culture forms. Not overnight, and rarely through one dramatic scandal. It forms through thousands of small moments where integrity is traded for speed.

Integrity is not a moral ornament. It is an operating requirement.

Why Shackleton still matters

In 1914, as Europe was entering war, Irishman Ernest Shackleton sailed south with an audacious plan: traverse Antarctica. The ship was called Endurance.

The mission failed. Catastrophically.

The ship was crushed by ice, and the expedition became a survival problem. Shackleton later wrote with clarity that the task had changed. The task was to reach land with all members of the expedition.

His exact words: “We are alive and well, and we have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us. The task is to reach land with all the members of the Expedition.”

That is the leadership moment.

Not bravery as branding. Not optimism as theatre. A decision to redefine success around responsibility.

Integrity is what holds when incentives collapse

Most leaders can perform values when incentives align.

The harder test is when:

• the original strategy is dead,

• reputational risk is rising,

• resources are shrinking,

• and people are scared.

Shackleton’s decision-making under pressure reads like a case study in integrity-as-practice:

1.He told the truth about reality.

The ship was beyond saving. Pretending otherwise would waste time, energy, and morale. 

2. He made trade-offs explicit.

When he chose the James Caird voyage, he articulated the risks and the logic. He judged there was no chance of an external search, so self-rescue was the only viable path. 

3.He protected morale like a critical asset.

Not through motivational speeches, but through structure, routine, humour, and “mental tonic” (Shackleton’s way of referring to his shipmates Banjo which he deemed critical for psychological survival) choices that kept nervous systems regulated under threat.

Integrity shows up as behaviours, not statements.

All twenty-eight crew members survived. Not because the circumstances were kind, but because the leadership was honest. That is the payoff of integrity under pressure: everyone comes home.

The modern corporate version of “crushed by ice”

Most corporate crises are less dramatic but psychologically similar:

• A product ships late, so teams massage the narrative.

• A leader misses targets, so blame is pushed down.

• A legal or compliance issue emerges, so people “delay” escalation and hide.

• A restructuring begins, and honesty disappears.

In each case, the same fork in the road appears:

Do we protect the story, or do we protect the people and the system?

If leaders protect the story, fear spreads. If leaders protect the people and the system, trust deepens, even in hard seasons.

Toxic culture is often a nervous-system problem

Toxic culture is not only an ethics problem. It is also a physiological environment.

When employees feel unsafe:

• the threat response increases,

• people become defensive,

• risk gets hidden instead of managed,

• learning collapses into self-protection.

This is why integrity is not just “doing the right thing.” Integrity creates the conditions where truth can surface early, and early truth is cheaper than late truth.

Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory offers a useful lens here. The autonomic nervous system operates across three states: ventral vagal (safety, social connection, creativity), sympathetic (mobilisation, fight or flight), and dorsal vagal (shutdown, collapse, withdrawal). When an organisation runs on threat, its people lose access to the ventral vagal state where collaboration, honest communication, and complex problem-solving live. In other words: the biology of fear is the biology of poor decisions. Leaders who understand this do not treat culture as an HR initiative. They treat it as a regulatory environment.

Integrity as an operating system (not a slogan)

If you want integrity to survive pressure, you need systems that make it easier to do the right thing than the convenient thing.

Here is a practical integrity framework that reduces toxic drift.

1) Incentives that do not reward distortion

If performance metrics reward only outcomes, people will optimise optics. Balance outcomes with process measures:

• quality of risk escalation,

• customer impact,

• peer feedback on collaboration,

• post-mortem learning adoption.

2) Decision logs for high-stakes calls

Require a one-page record for major decisions:

• what we knew,

• what we assumed,

• options considered,

• risks accepted,

• who owns follow-up.

This stops “ethical amnesia.”

3) Speak-up pathways that actually work

If escalation requires heroism, you will get silence.

Build multiple channels:

• line manager,

• skip-level,

• confidential reporting,

• and protected retrospectives.

Then prove, repeatedly, that truth is welcomed.

4) Consequences that are consistent

Nothing destroys integrity faster than selective enforcement.

If values apply only to junior staff, culture decays.

5) Leadership behaviours that model reality

Leaders set the tone in micro-moments:

• admitting uncertainty,

• correcting the record,

• taking responsibility publicly,

• giving credit accurately,

• naming trade-offs without spin.

What this looks like in practice

David had been a regional director for nine years. Externally, his division was outperforming. Internally, three senior managers had left in eighteen months, exit interviews citing “leadership style” without elaboration. His direct reports had stopped raising concerns in meetings. The few who tried were met with what David called “robust challenge” and what his team experienced as public humiliation.

When we began working together, David did not see the problem as his leadership. He saw it as a team issue. He saw it as a resilience deficit. That is the survival response in action: when a leader’s nervous system is locked in sympathetic overdrive, threat feels like clarity and control feels like competence. The body confuses hypervigilance for high performance.

The shift came when David recognised that his “robust challenge” was a protective pattern learned decades earlier: in a household where vulnerability was met with criticism, control became safety. Once he could see the pattern without shame, he could choose differently. Not perfectly. Not overnight. But consistently enough that within six months, his team started telling the truth in meetings again. And the decisions that followed were better for it.

(Details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.)

A short integrity checklist for leaders

Ask yourself:

• Where are we tolerating small dishonesty because results look good?

• What truths are people avoiding in meetings?

• Who is rewarded for “making it go away”?

• What happens to someone who raises risk early?

• Do our incentives create courage or concealment?

Closing: the question that matters

Shackleton is remembered not because he “won” the mission, but because he held responsibility when the mission collapsed.

That is the moment modern leadership still needs.

Because sooner or later, every organisation meets its own version of ice.

The body knows before the boardroom does. Your shoulders carry the tension of conversations you avoided. Your sleep fractures under the weight of decisions you deferred. Your gut registers the misalignment between what you say publicly and what you know privately. These are not abstract symptoms. They are the somatic cost of leading without integrity, and they compound.

But here is the other side of that truth: when leaders choose integrity, the body settles too. The chest opens. The breath deepens. The nervous system returns to a state where trust, creativity, and honest connection become possible again. From concealment to candour. From survival to leadership. From performance to presence.

What are you carrying as a leader that no one sees?

If you are navigating a trust fracture, cultural toxicity, or ethical drift inside a high-performing environment, I work with leaders and teams on regulation, truth-telling, and integrity-led decision systems.