Lag-lead compensators are well known in automatic control engineering. They have 4 parameters to be adjusted (tuned) for proper operation. The frequency response of the control system or the root locus plot are traditionally used to tune the compensator in a lengthy procedure. A first order with an integrator process in a unity feedback loop of 67.3% maximum overshoot and 12 seconds settling time is controlled using a lag-lead compensator (through simulation). The lag-lead compensator is tuned by minimizing the sum of absolute error of the control system using MATLAB. Four functional constrains are used to control the performance of the lag-lead compensated control system. The result was reducing the process oscillation to 2.438% overshoot and an 0.648 seconds settling time. The performance of the lag-lead compensated system with the present tuning approach is compared with the classical tuning using the root locus technique. The comparison showed that the present tuning technique is superior.