By Jacqueline Stone. Jacqueline is a lawyer, venture capitalist and Faculty member with Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership, which works with leaders and organisations across Australia to grow their ethical capability.

If you’ve worked in any profession long enough, you’ll know that “integrity” is one of those words everyone nods at but few stop to think about. It turns up in codes of conduct, strategy documents, even on office walls, solid, reassuring, and usually unexamined. We all agree it’s important. But what difference does it make to the way you go about your work, day to day

At Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership, we sometimes hear integrity described as a moral test - the dramatic fork in the road, where you either do the right thing or you don’t. Those moments matter, of course. But they’re not where integrity begins. Integrity, like character, is less about the grand gesture than the daily practice. It’s not just an event. It’s a process.

"Integrity isn’t glamorous, but it’s foundational. Technical skill makes you competent, integrity makes you trustworthy and builds your reputation."

The Everyday Work of Integrity

For chartered accountants, integrity is often reduced to a tidy list of synonyms, honesty, fairness, uprightness, objectivity. All useful, but not quite the essence of the concept. Integrity isn’t a label, it’s a habit, the way you do what you do, particularly when no one is watching.

You can see it in small, unremarkable acts, the accuracy of your reports, the clarity of your advice, the way you treat colleagues and clients. It’s there in how you speak up when something doesn’t feel right and in how you handle your own mistakes.

The Code of Ethics says integrity means being “honest and straightforward in all professional and business relationships.” It sounds refreshingly simple but living it isn’t easy. Honesty is the discipline of staying true to the facts. Straightforwardness demands courage. The second part, in particular, can be testing. It’s one thing to be truthful, it’s another to be truthful when it’s awkward. Integrity asks you to do both, and to keep doing it, long after the moment has passed and the attention has shifted.

Building the Habit

Integrity doesn’t appear fully formed, waiting to be called upon in a crisis. It’s built quietly, through repetition. The way you handle the small decisions each day trains you for the big ones later. That’s why reflection is so important and so underrated.

We build integrity by paying attention to what we do and why we do it. It might be through documenting decisions, checking your reasoning against a peer or with the CA Advisory Group, or noticing that uncomfortable voice in your head asking, “Is that really fine?” Integrity lives in that moment, in choosing to listen rather than silence the question.

Failures of integrity, on the other hand, rarely start with a spectacular collapse. They begin with a small compromise, a convenient interpretation, an unchallenged assumption, a “just this once.” Left unchecked, these tiny cracks widen until the structure gives way. The spectacular scandals we read about are simply the final stage of that slow erosion of personal or cultural integrity.

When Things Go Wrong

Cranlana’s view is that ethics isn’t a moral scoreboard. There aren’t good people and bad people, there are people doing their best, sometimes well, sometimes not. Integrity isn’t the absence of error, it’s how you respond when you realise you’ve made one.

When integrity fails, the key question isn’t just what went wrong, but what happens next. Do you take responsibility? Show insight? Try to put things right? Professional bodies look for accountability, ownership and restitution, not perfection. Owning the problem can, paradoxically, be the clearest sign that your integrity is still intact.

Why It Matters

Integrity isn’t glamorous, but it’s foundational. Technical skill makes you competent, integrity makes you trustworthy and builds your reputation. It’s what connects your expertise to your humanity, the part that says, “This work matters because people depend on it.”

So rather than treating integrity as a fixed attribute, a badge you wear to meetings, think of it as something you exercise. Quietly. Consistently. With the occasional wobble and a sense of humour about your own imperfections.

It won’t make you perfect, but it will make you grounded. The integrity of the accountancy profession is not upheld by abstract codes alone but by the daily decisions of those who practise within it. In that sense, integrity remains the profession’s core discipline, strengthened by continual use, diminished by neglect. It does not announce itself loudly, nor seek applause. It simply holds the professional self in alignment, ensuring that actions and values point in the same direction.

Thank you for reading the second instalment in our Ethical Leadership series. Ethical Leadership is a partnership between CA ANZ and the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership, exploring the role of ethics as an integral part of your professional membership.