When someone declines your meeting invitation. When someone is late. When someone doesn’t show up.
When they disagree with you. When they don’t understand. When they contradict you.
When they don’t volunteer, or leave the team, or join a competitor.
Remember that two rudes don’t make a right.
Assume positive intent.
1997 – “This is your goal. Go meet it. I don’t care how you do it, just do it.”
2007 – “This is your goal. Go meet it but remember to do it the right way.”
2017 – “This is your goal. Let’s discuss how you are going to meet it the right way.”
This is post 200!
I spent the day in Sydney with a small group of ethics & compliance officers (ECOs). As we discussed the role of an ECO, how to create an ethical culture, and how to deploy policies in a global organization, I was reminded of an important leadership guideline: select only a handful of priorities and dedicate the majority of your communications to them.
We’ve all heard the expression “When everything is important, nothing is important.” In the E&C world, not knowing how to prioritize our activities can have major consequences. It is thus critical for leaders to clearly communicate their priorities – with words, of course, but more importantly by their actions. Employees are always scanning their environment to detect what is important to their boss.
In my experience, it is most effective to have three or four priorities and to communicate about one or more of them on a daily basis. Employees who are asked to juggle more balls than they can handle must know which ones they can drop if need be. Otherwise, they are likely to drop the wrong one, at great cost to them and to the organization.
During our second day in Singapore, our team discussed how culture is created.
Simply put, culture is an outcome of our processes, both formal and informal. This is in line with the popular definition of culture: “How things are really done around here.” This common definition reminds us that our written policies (formal processes) will always lose to what people actually do, to what is condoned (informal processes).
The idea that culture is an outcome of our processes is empowering. It means that we can change our culture as easily as we can change our processes. When people say that it is difficult to change a culture, what they means is that it is difficult to change how they do things, to change their long-established processes and habits. And by difficult, they often mean that they don’t have the courage or the will to change how things are.
The recipe to change a culture is simple: identify the elements of your culture that you don’t like, link them to a specific formal or informal process, change that process, and hold your ground. It will take time for your organization to believe that you truly want the change you are seeking.
Courage, hard work, and patience. That’s what we need to change a culture.
I am currently in steamy Singapore (90 F and thunderstorms) to participate in training sessions and workshops with 40 ethics & compliance colleagues from my organization.
Yesterday, we discussed the difference between personal and organizational integrity and reputation. In essence, a leader with personal integrity will enjoy a good personal reputation, and that is all fine. But unless that leader is also committed to creating and supporting processes that protect the organization’s integrity and reputation, her personal reputation is merely interesting to the organization. A leader who never pays a bribe is of little benefit to the organization if she doesn’t put in place processes to prevent corrupt behavior by others.
A leader who allows his organization’s integrity and reputation to suffer will also see his business suffer. His requests for additional headcount, for funding, for equipment will be denied by higher-ups, who can no longer trust his organization. If such a leader didn’t lose his job for failing to protect the organization’s integrity in the first place, he’s likely to lose it soon for not meeting operational goals.
This is one of the most compelling perspective I have seen to describe the value of ethics & compliance to business leaders. It turns on its head the too-oft used expression “Good ethics is good business,” which sounds good but is far from a call to action.
Ethical leaders understand that their personal integrity is merely an asset, a compass, a guide to creating organizational integrity.
The real work remains to be done.
I am writing these words offline, on my iPad mini, at 30,000 feet, less than an hour from Doha. I left JFK about half-a-day ago and my ultimate destination is Singapore – but I will have to wait another half-day before getting there.
Once on the ground, I will spend 2 days with 40 ethics & compliance colleagues from my organization. Together we will teach and learn. We will ask questions and provide answers. We will state problems and offer solutions. We will be vulnerable and support each other.
The role of ethics & compliance officer is challenging (in a good way), stimulating, rewarding – and at times emotionally draining. One day you can feel connected to your fellow employees; the other you feel isolated. To weather these emotional ups and downs, it helps to have a support group. And that’s exactly why we’ll be meeting this week.
Come Wednesday, I will make my way to Sydney for a similar event with my ANZ colleagues.
What a blessing.
I love my job.
Ethics & Compliance professionals spend a lot of time creating, communicating, and enforcing rules. We believe that we play a key role in protecting the organization and we take that role seriously.
And so we are sometimes baffled when an employee breaks a rule. How could they? We worked so hard to create this rule! We published it in the policy manual, we sent emails, we provided training, we explained why we have that rule, why the rule is important. What gives?!
Often, the problem is that we fell short. Communicating the rule is better than not communicating it. Providing training is better than not training. Explaining why the rule exists is better than just shoving it down their throat. But what if they don’t believe our “why”? What if they don’t care?
The best way to sell a “why”, to make employees care, is to link our rules to shared values. Employees who believe in delivering safe products to customers are willing to comply with a rule that requires parts testing. Employees who believe in winning sales the right way don’t mind a rule that requires vetting of sales agents. And so on. In a world of rules, a value is king.
Employees must believe what you believe.
HT to Seth Godin
Say an employee approaches you and asks if she can accept a gift from a supplier. You will ask the usual questions (value of the gift, current negotiations, etc.) and then provide your guidance.
If the answer is “Yes”, or “Yes, and…”, most employees will be satisfied.
If the answer is “Yes, but…”, some employees are likely to push back a little but in the end will accept the advice.
If the answer is “No”, a select few will accuse you of not understanding how business is done and how relationships are created. That’s fine.
The rare and most dangerous kind are the employees who accuse you of not understanding the business before you even say “No”. They get upset at the mere fact that you are asking questions.
Those are the ones you need to keep a close eye on going forward.
Let’s say you are not much of a joke teller and you join a small organization where everyone has a blast sharing hilarious jokes. Chances are you’ll start paying attention to jokes you hear outside of work and will share them with colleagues at the office. You want to fit in. We all want to fit in. A few thousand years ago, not fitting in and being an outcast meant a certain death. So we are hardwired to fit in.
Let’s say you do like telling jokes and you keep your materials very clean. Now you join a small organization where they laugh loudest at mildly inappropriate jokes. Might your repertoire change a bit? It probably will. After all, everyone seems to think it’s fine and they’ve been telling these jokes for years.
You see where I’m going with this? What jokes are acceptable, how we recruit talent from competitors, how we keep our books, how we discipline, what gifts we allow our employees to accept from suppliers or give to customers – all we do is greatly influenced by the culture of the organization. The culture has such a strong pull that the best of us will change our behavior to conform. The longer we stay in orbit, the more normal certain things will feel, even if those things would have shocked us a few years ago. And when we assimilate, we reinforce the culture for everyone else.
When our livelihood depends on fitting in, it is very difficult to stand against the machine. So for those (college seniors) out there looking for a job, my advice is this: place the highest importance on the culture of the organization you are considering joining. Your happiness, your integrity, your sense of self are at stake. You want to join an organization that shares your values and whose sense of purpose is aligned with yours. With such an alignment, all your energies can be focused on growth and contribution.
Beware the employee who gets upset because you ask “too many questions” before approving his request to accept a gift from a supplier.
The Ethical Leader 