When Success And Integrity Are Not Aligned

Three weeks ago a runner was caught cheating in a half-marathon. The runner cut the race short by about 1.5 miles (about 12% of the total distance). She crossed the finish line in second place, but decided not to say anything about her shorter course.

To cover her tracks, later in the afternoon of race day, the runner biked the half marathon course at a running-pace speed in order to upload the result into her Strava profile and simulate that she had actually completed the entire thing.

A couple of days after the race, when she was caught, she publicly apologized by saying she didn’t feel well during the race and decided to cut it short. However, she got “swept away” by the moment and pretended that she had run the entire course.

Her case is not unique. Another runner who was trying to do the “fastest known time (FKT)” across America was caught cheating by people who just wanted to see him complete his feat. Instead of running, the guy was hanging out inside his van, which was moving at running-pace speed in order to simulate that it was an actual runner. The van was driven by the runner’s support team!

Cheating is not only bad when it’s done by Enron’s executives, or by the people at Wells Fargo who created fake bank accounts to meet sales quotas or by politicians trying to cover up their wrongdoings. Cheating is bad, all the time, regardless of the context.

I don’t mean to share these stories to shame the runners, because I'm sure they already feel pretty bad when the first thing that comes up when you google their names is their cheating and not their other deeds. However, I want to make the point that cheating as a fast way to success, which happens not only in politics and business, but in more mundane things such as running, is a terrible thing to do.

Imagine how many people worked their butts off to complete that half-marathon or how much the person who held the previous FKT across America had to train to make it happen. Imagine how many people work too hard in their lives only to get overshadowed by others who cheated and never got caught.

C.S. Lewis once said that “integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching.” There shouldn’t be an “integrity police”. However, I think it’s our collective responsibility to keep our eyes open, especially when it comes to keeping business and political leaders accountable. If someone cheats in the small things, can he be trusted for the bigger things?

Today, partially because of technology and immediate access to all kinds of information, I believe we are more apt to scrutinize things that don’t really sound right. If you know a runner whose normal marathon time is 3:45, but one day finishes in 3:03, you might think that’s weird and perhaps decide to look more into the matter to see what’s real and what’s not. Same thing with the politician or business leader who makes a claim that sounds just too odd to be true.

The important message is not only that success can never, ever come before integrity, but that we need to keep watching and scrutinizing, remaining alert if when we see something that is askew.

Success is very appealing and many people try to cheat in order to succeed faster. However, even when most cheaters don’t have the moral compass to realize that what they’re doing is wrong, they do leave a trail behind of many others who have done things in the proper way and haven’t actually succeeded yet. If cheaters are the “role model” there’s a terrible incentive for honorable people to find “alternative” ways to succeed faster or to get disheartened and stop trying. However, I do hope that when people are faced with the decision of cheating or doing the right thing, they decide on doing the right thing.

Ultimately, it’s important that in our circles of influence (our family, our friends, our teams and colleagues, our businesses or our political parties) we continue to strengthen the message, by saying it and by being a role model, that success without integrity is unsustainable and cheap. And that INTEGRITY always must come before achievement and success. 

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