This paper deals with the pole assignment technique in systems with integral action and sliding mode control. It is known that, because of the order reduction provided by the sliding mode, one gain of the sliding surface that determines the pole placement can be freely selected. In this paper the existence of a direct connection between this gain and an integral wind up behavior is demonstrated. A sufficient condition for the existence of this problem is obtained. A control strategy based on the appropriate selection of the aforesaid free gain is proposed. Two examples are presented.