A few regulators in Europe and Australasia are appointing psychologists to company boards. The regulators believe that psychologists can help identify risks by understanding the culture of the company.

Of course.

Companies should not wait until a psychologist is forced on them by a regulator, no more than they should wait for a monitor. It’s clear that having someone in the organization who can understand, explain, measure and improve the culture is a plus. Yet, few companies are appointing Chief Culture Officers.

Sometimes, industries self-regulate before governments decide to regulate them. At other times, governments take the first step. When it comes to recognizing the importance of culture, governments now seem to be ahead.

WalMart settled its long-standing FCPA enforcement action yesterday. Under the administrative order, WalMart agreed to pay $327M.

While this amount seems large, our friend Matt Kelly reminds us that WalMart’s global sales will raise as much in 5 hours. A small price to pay given the expansion provided by the corrupt practices.

To be fair, Walmart also spent $900M to improve its controls and systems after the fact. The mighty retailer is now in a position to become a leader of good compliance and ethical practices. Will it seize the opportunity?

If you see an illegal or unethical practice in your organization today, imagine yourself five years down the road after an enforcement action. Create a vivid picture of paying fines, beefing up your compliance program and trying to restore your reputation. Then, instead waiting for the inevitable, take immediate action.

Every day offers an opportunity for ethical leadership.

What we design designs us back.

How we design a room, a building or a city affect how we behave in that environment. Change the design and you change the behavior. Put another way, if you want to change the behavior, change the design.

The same is true for the policies, training and controls that we create in our organization. How we design them affects how employees behave. To change behavior requires that we change our designs. Culture is an outcome of our processes.

When my organization was revising its Code of Ethics and selecting new values, some were questioning the wisdom of writing aspirational statements that did not reflect our current reality. I would argue that all designs are aspirational. When we are done creating a building, it is only the start of a bigger design, the design of those who will inhabit it. Thus when we create a values-based Code, it is only the start of designing an ethical workforce.

Create today the world you want to see tomorrow.

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Hat tip to Jason Silva.

People protest to keep what they have.

People protest to gain a new right.

People protest when they see injustice.

But sometimes people protest too late and they lose the fight.

There is a cause worth fighting for in your organization today. Are the employees mobilizing effectively? Will they make their demands in time?

As an ethical leader, are you part of the solution?

Some people work in a team or a department with a good culture. Let’s call them the Happy Ones.

And some don’t. The Unhappy Ones.

Therefore, inside a company, the Happy Ones are rubbing elbows with the Unhappy Ones, and it always seems that the latter affect the former, and not the other way around.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Happy Ones do not have to resign themselves to being the only ones happy in the company.

Instead, they can start a series of experiments trying to answer the following question: “How might we turn the Unhappy Ones we interact with into Happy Ones?”

Try and try again until you succeed with one group. Now your group of Happy Ones is larger and it rubs elbows with more people than before, including new Unhappy Ones.

Continue the experiments until you have a Happy Company.

(Warning: It could take years)

When my organization updated its Code of Ethics two years ago, we included a number of Q&As to help employees understand what behaviors we expected them to adopt. We knew that simply sharing our rules and values wasn’t enough. Sometimes, you need to illustrate what a value-in-action looks like.

We didn’t realize it at the time but we were writing the first pages of a playbook. As explained by Robb Osinski in this Forbes article, a handbook is nice but a playbook is better. A handbook will point to the rules and to the resources. A playbook will walk you through, or more accurately walk you out, of an ethical dilemma step-by-step. It’s like a guide who knows her way out of the maze and calmly shows you what turns to take to get out safely.

We should start with a handbook but we should soon follow with a playbook. People often know what the right thing to do is, they just don’t know how to do it. As E&C professionals, if we truly want to help our employees, we need to give them more than rules in a handbook.