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Compliance Training Can Be Fun?

The Baldrige Criteria promote ethical behavior through questions in the Leadership, Workforce Focus, and Results categories including:

  • How does your organization promote and ensure ethical behavior in all interactions?
  • What are your key processes and measures or indicators for enabling and monitoring ethical behavior?
  • How do you monitor and respond to breaches of ethical behavior?
  • What are your results for key measures or indicators of breaches of ethical behavior?

Most organizations try to instill ethical behavior with some type of compliance training. As Dan and Chip Heath point out in “How to Make Corporate Training Rock,” that training tends to be so dull that nobody would take it if it wasn’t mandatory.

For BearingPoint, a management and technology firm, compliance training was too critical to make it boring, so they told their chief compliance officer to redesign their program to influence the behavior of employees operating in different organizational cultures across the country. Russ Berland, the compliance officer, and his team interviewed employees about the “gray areas” they encountered. The stories they heard became the basis for a fictional video series of ten short episodes. You can watch an episode at the story link above.

Modeled after The Office, the series features a Kevin, a “lovably, oily boss,” and Vanessa, “a levelheaded analyst on Kevin’s team.” Here’s an exchange between the two when Kevin proposes throwing a surprise party for a client, Ricardo, to curry favor.

VANESSA: Sir, how are we going to pay for this?

KEVIN: We’ll just work it into the bill somewhere.

VANESSA: We can’t bill a client…

14Dec2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

How to Build a Culture of Social Responsibility

Social responsibility is a Baldrige core value because it is a characteristic of high-performing organizations. According to a study by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, more organizations are establishing corporate citizenship management policies and practices to ensure citizenship is integrated into their core business. The study concludes: “Increasingly, customers, employees, business partners, and government demand that corporations take an active role in social, environmental, and community concerns. That’s why strategic corporate citizenship is more than good business—it’s a business essential.”

If business ethics and corporate social responsibility have not been priorities at your organization and you want to change that, where do you start? The Hill Center for Ethical Business Leadership can show you the way.

The Hill Center is part of the James J. Hill Reference Library in St. Paul, Minnesota. It works with leaders who want to take their organizations beyond ethical compliance to align ethics with business performance. To that end, it created the eInsight Ethics Quiz.

The quiz takes about 20 minutes to complete. There are no right or wrong answers. Final scores are compared against industry peers and action steps are provided to improve performance.

Leaders looking for ideas on how to build a culture of business ethics and corporate social responsibility will find guidance in the feedback to their survey. And it’s free! Click here to take the quiz. Click here to learn more about how the resources the Hill Center offers.

To read more about corporate social responsibility, click on these articles:

16Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Backdoor Access to World-Class Performance

A CEO recently enlightened me about the transformative power of a robust safety, diversity, or ethics program: It can institutionalize a culture of employee engagement, process management, open communication, and continuous improvement.

Safety, diversity, and ethics have value in and of themselves. Where they have value beyond themselves is in their ability to align people with a shared vision. Everybody shares the vision of a safe workplace. Everyone shares the vision of a diverse workforce (well, maybe not everyone, but nobody’s going to argue against it). Everyone shares the vision of working for an ethical organization.

Leaders can use safety, diversity, and ethics to rally people around ambitious goals and get them nodding in agreement, establish the habit of adhering to policies and procedures, focus people on measurable results, communicate a consistent message, pursue process improvements, and celebrate success. In other words, safety, diversity, and ethics are levers that leaders can use to transform their organizations. They are large-scale pilot projects for how to make your organization more systematic, holistic, and aligned.

For example, if you are an executive for a bank with dissatisfied customers and employees, declining revenue, and escalating costs, and you want to do something about it, you may want to change your bank’s culture. Rather than give in to the quick-but-fatal temptation to invest in dubious risky ventures, you can buck the trend by becoming a role model for the ethical bank.

You involve employees in writing a Code of Conduct that everyone who works for the bank must sign—and…

9Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Baldrige for the 20-Teens

Gill Corkindale is an executive coach and writer based in London. She recently wrote an article about Baldrige for the Harvard Business Review entitled “A Better Decade for Business is Coming” (December 31, 2009). And she wrote it without using the word “Baldrige” once!

Corkindale lists four things business leaders can do to correct the negative perception of business built during the past decade (Enron’s collapse, dotcom bust, Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, irresponsibility of the banking sector, global recession, declining wages—unless you’re an executive, etc.). Her four recommendations are:

  1. Examine your organization systematically. “What is really going on?” she writes. “What needs to be improved?” In other words, conduct a Baldrige assessment to answer these questions and systematically improve your organization.
  2. Build a new dialogue for business. Leaders must make ethical behavior, accountability, sustainability, longer-term focus, and community awareness part of the business agenda. Once again, a Baldrige assessment will help you understand how to make these issues part of your agenda and how well you do it.
  3. Engage people to make the best possible contribution to the business and wider society. “This means sharing power, information, responsibility, and, of course, rewards,” writes Corkindale. Workforce engagement, a key element of the Baldrige model, considers how you share power, information, responsibility, and rewards.
  4. Understand what it really takes to be a leader. “Simplicity is the key.” A Baldrige assessment helps leaders lead by presenting a clear picture of where their organization is today and how it can improve performance tomorrow.

To learn more about integrating Baldrige, click on these articles:

4Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

The Most and Least Ethical Companies

According to Covalence, a Swiss research firm, Monsanto is the least ethical multinational corporation in the world. Covalence used quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate 581 companies over a seven-year period. Criteria included labor standards, waste management, and human rights records.

The top-ranked companies were IBM, Intel, and HSBC. Rounding out the top ten were Marks & Spencer, Unilever, Xerox, General Electric, Cisco Systems, Dell, and Procter & Gamble.

The worst were:

  1. Monsanto Co. This is the same corporation that Forbes named America’s Best Company in December. Apparently, ethics wasn’t part of the equation.
  2. Halliburton Company. Dick Cheney’s legacy lives on in both the business and political worlds.
  3. Chevron Corp.
  4. Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc.
  5. Philip Morris International Inc.
  6. Occidental Petroleum Corporation
  7. Ryanair Holdings plc
  8. Syngenta AG
  9. Grupo Mexico SA de CV
  10. Total SA

The companies on this list may survive in the short term because of their economic success, but sustaining that success is another matter. As Adam Werbach, former Sierra Club president, wrote, true sustainability has four equal parts: economic, social, environmental, and cultural (click here). It’s hard to imagine any corporation standing for long on one of those legs, no matter how strong it is.

To read more about corporate social responsibility, click on these articles:

3Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Excessive Executive Compensation Derails Excellence

I’m certainly no expert on executive compensation, but I believe there are two reasons that paying executives exorbitant salaries, bonuses, and stock options is bad for business. The first is ethical. The second is cultural.

An article online at the Wall Street Journal today stated that “pensions for top executives rose an average of 19% in 2008, with more than 200 executives seeing pensions increase more than 50%.”  Yet, as Ellen E. Schultz and Tom McGinty write in “Pensions for Executives on Rise,” “Executive pensions rose even as the share prices at the companies declined an average of 37% in 2008 and many firms froze employee pensions and suspended retirement-plan contributions.” And cut employee benefits. And laid people off.

That’s an ethical issue. It’s a moral issue. The Economic Policy Institute stated that the average CEO of a company with at least $1 billion in annual revenue makes 262 times what the average worker makes. I’ve heard all the rationalizations for this but they miss the point: Companies pay their CEOs these outrageous amounts because they have passive investors and servile directors who rarely question the conventional wisdom of paying a leader 262 times more than other employees. Very few have the courage to break this paradigm.

In “Ripping up the rules of management” (CNNMoney), Susanna Hamner and Tom McNichol compare the conventional “wisdom” to the best practices of companies such as Whole Foods, which limits executive pay to 19 times the average full-time worker’s salary. The article quotes Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who said, “Fewer…

4Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

10 Critical Questions: Results

The Baldrige model focuses on results: You don’t transform an organization without a very good reason, and for those organizations that transform themselves through Baldrige, the reason is because it delivers results. Check out some of the results achieved by Baldrige Award recipients in the following areas:

Better yet, read Category 7 in the award application summary of any winner you choose (click here) and you will find impressive results across all six of the areas measured.

The Results Category is the only Category in the Baldrige Criteria that examines your organization’s performance and improvement—but this one Category is worth 45% of the possible points when scoring a Baldrige application because the Baldrige model focuses on results. The best way to evaluate your results is through an assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your results, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:

What are your current levels and trends in key measures of:

  1. Product performance OR student learning and improvement in student learning OR health care outcomes, health care process results, patient safety, and patients’ functional status?
  2. Customer/student/patient and stakeholder satisfaction, dissatisfaction, relationship building, and engagement?
  3. Financial performance?
  4. Market or marketplace performance?
  5. Workforce engagement and satisfaction?
  6. Workforce and leader development?
  7. The operational performance of your work systems and key work processes?
  8. Regulatory and legal compliance and ethical behavior?
  9. For each of these measures, how does your organization’s performance compare to that of your competitors and other organizations with…
29Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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