The more a single person does, the less time she has to communicate to others what she is doing.
Less communication leads to confusion, conflict, frustration, disengagement, and waste. Not ideal when the goal is to do more.
For many of us, it would be wise to consider doing less and being more transparent about what we do. Transparency leads to trust, respect, integrity, and excellence – outcomes that all ethical leaders should seek to generate.
Every now and then – and more often for some people – we get frustrated at work.
Frustration is inevitable for anyone who cares deeply about the work they do. That frustration often manifests itself in negative ways. We can be disrespectful to others, we can become disengaged, or, in the worst cases, we can sabotage our own organization.
We often react this way despite the fact that we are healthy and that our basic needs for food/shelter/clothing are met aplenty. We lose perspective on what really matters. We lose perspective because we are told that our work makes the world a better place, that we must do more less, that we must do it flawlessly – because if we don’t, something terrible will happen (i.e. the world will not be a better place and our stock price will go down).
We don’t get this type of pressure at home or with friends.
It’s OK to get frustrated. And we should care about our work. But our response to frustration should be to pause, count our blessings, and decide to do the right thing.
Because employees who perform with trust, respect, and integrity have a much better shot at making the world a better place.
In 2015, Deloitte published a compendium on building world-class ethics and compliance programs. In it, they expand on five (5) key differentiators in the highest performing programs. I was particularly interested in the one dealing with corporate culture. My reading notes are at the end of this post but allow me to share one passage that struck me:
“Culture has always been important to how organizations operate. So why is it getting so much attention lately? One reason is that regulators have come to the realization that without a culture of integrity, organizations are likely to view their ethics and compliance programs as a set of check-the-box activities, or even worse, as a roadblock to achieving their business objectives.”
At any given time, organizations employ a few executives and managers who believe that compliance programs get in the way of doing business. What they say in meetings, what they write in emails, and how they behave generally undermines the program. If you work with one of them, consider this other passage from the report:
“Nothing will damage culture more than the malcontents. When people get in the way of supporting the culture, they can cause roadblocks and undermine the efforts of the enterprise. They must be identified, counseled, and offered the opportunity to conform to expected behavior, or they should be separated from the organization.”
Ethical leaders have the responsibility to ensure that counseling is provided or separation effectuated. It takes courage. As all forms of leadership do.
As business scandals continue to surface, we see more companies looking to hire compliance officers. So we must ask: do we really need more employees whose job it is to ensure that other employees are following the rules?
Thinking about the recent Volkswagen scandal, would more compliance officers have prevented the deployment of its cheating software? Compliance officers do their job within a set of corporate values. If those values don’t include honesty, integrity, and trust, then what exactly is the role of a compliance officer? The time has come for organizations to discover the values they want to live by, instead of the rules they want to follow.
Ethics Officers more naturally consider culture and values when addressing compliance failures. Values provide guidance not only in interpreting a rule but in deciding what to do when no rule governs. That’s why values-based organizations will always outperform, and outlive, those that are rules-based. In the aftermath of an ethical scandal, organizations regain none of the public trust by hiring a large outside law firm. To regain trust, organizations must publicly commit to live by a set of clear values. And they must be willing to lose business rather than compromise those values.
Anyone can be an ethical leader. Everyone must be.
All we need are four things:
The Ethical Leader 