Compliance Culture

Practical insights for compliance and ethics professionals and commentary on the intersection of compliance and culture.

Selected TED/TEDx talks on privacy and reputation

In an increasingly inter-connected and digital society, challenges to privacy and reputation are frequent.  Even before social media put everyone at constant pressure to “overshare,” when people’s very personal details were not always a quick Google search away, privacy was still under threat.  A person’s visibility and public representations are often judged and demanded for credibility and honesty evaluations performed by employers, potential partners, members of the community, and even complete strangers.  Giving up privacy in favor of radical openness may be the way some reality stars have attained their celebrity, but for many people this feels invasive and like a violation of security.

In a broader sense, people’s individual privacy settings in terms of what they wish to share or disclose, how, and to whom, have a direct bearing on reputation.  Cultural practices around privacy and information sharing can give rise to serious reputational risk that impacts individuals and communities and frays the social fabric in which transparency is desirable or even possible.  These norms and ethical expectations are intensified in the digital age, where an individual’s personal information can never truly be deleted or taken back once it is made public.

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Ben & Jerry’s CSR origins

Corporate culture is most effective when it is part of the organization’s origins. Compliance by force can never be fully effective at risk control or influencing corporate values. While organizations can and should always be looking to improve their standards and frameworks for compliance risk management, the most successful compliance programs will be rooted in the native culture of the company. For this reason thinking of compliance fundamentals from the beginning (such as described in this post or this post about start-ups, this post about founder-led business, or this post about small businesses) wherever possible gives the greatest chance of imbedding an authentic and engaging culture of compliance.

The above is especially true from a corporate social responsibility (CSR) perspective. CSR values adopted purely and un-authentically, just for competitive advantage or public relations attention, will not be convincing to all consumers or stakeholders, and therefore will not be sustainable. Companies that have some relation to or interest in political issues or social justice should recognize this early and often and incorporate activism and engagement into their company mission statements and values.

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Compliance and Stephen R. Covey’s “emotional bank accounts”

Stephen R. Covey’s famed self-development insights can also be applied to compliance and ethics. The acclaimed author of the worldwide best seller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has provided motivation to managers, students, and progressive people for many years. Covey’s work was far more than just a self-help guide or a management how-to. With his emphasis on character ethic as well as values and principles, Covey created an interesting body of work that can be broadly used in crafting the business mission statements he endorses so heartily, from a compliance and ethics and perspective.

This post takes an in-depth look at each one of Covey’s 7 Habits to explore the applicability of each one for the work and goals of compliance professionals. All seven of the habits encourage conduct that is positive and productive for compliance risk awareness. Inner success, sustainable and functional interdependence, and strategic, purpose-driven vision are just some examples of the compliance culture qualities that the 7 Habits consistently endorse. Trustworthiness, credibility, and honesty are the cornerstones of individual relationships and organizational identities in Covey’s system.

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Principles of ethical decision-making

Simply put, ethical decision-making is about making choices from a basis of integrity.  Decisions are not pure or in a vacuum.  People make choices in an often very complicated landscape of conflicting interests, isolation from consequences, stubborn habits and heuristics, and narrow cognitive frameworks.

Therefore effective ethical decision making has two components: first, the intention and second, the action.  The intention requires an individual determination to do the right thing for the right reason at the right time.  The action, on the other hand, requires commitment at both the individual and the collective/organizational level to maintain and support the intention.  This process happens amid a complicated context of incentives for, and obstacles to, both individual ethics and corporate culture of compliance.

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Compliance and ethics in Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is a classic comedy film from 1993.  The movie centers around Bill Murray’s character Phil Connors, who is a weatherman on-location in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania covering the annual Groundhog Day event there.  The town’s festivities around the ritual of the groundhog coming out of his hole to check whether or not he sees his shadow are a huge media event and popular celebration which Connors, who is generally obnoxious and condescending, finds ridiculous.  On February 2, Connors has an unpleasant and miserable day in which he is annoyed by everyone around him, acts out, and totally fails to charm his producer Rita Hanson, played by Andie McDowell, with whom he is in unrequited love.  The next day he wakes up and is alarmed and confused to find that it is not a new day and February 3, but rather it is February 2 again and the prior day is repeating exactly as it happened before.

Connors winds up trapped in a time loop in which only he is lucid of it.  He experiences February 2 over and over, with his memory and knowledge retained but otherwise no evidence in the world or other people that the day has happened before and will happen again.  Connors goes through a complicated process of reckoning with this reality and ultimately makes an ambition of getting Hanson, who hates him, to fall in love with him.

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CSR tips for compliance professionals

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is closely related to business compliance.  Both CSR and business compliance share the objective to integrate requirements from legal, regulatory, and social expectations with organizational strategy.  Business compliance has the broadest mandate of creating both rules-based and values-based structures and systems to support corporate and employee integrity and adherence to laws, regulations, and norms.  In contrast, CSR has these same goals but focuses on engaging in corporate actions that contribute to social good, generate positive public relations attention, and promote ethics and accountability.

While compliance is often focused on defining internal standards for conduct and strategy in order to follow or improve upon outside requirements, CSR has a much more public posture.  CSR is focused on defining the company’s positions on the environment, reform, justice, philanthropy, community relations, and other outwards-facing social initiatives.  After these objectives are defined, the company then presents and promotes its positions to consumers and society. CSR and compliance both contribute to a company’s mission statement and values, but CSR has a heavier hand in guiding the corporate image that is presented to consumers, industry partners, and society as a whole.  

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Imposters throughout history

Imposters are a fascinating sub-set of fraudsters. Throughout history, individuals who have committed fraud for a variety of reasons – financial gain, social mobility, and even political or corporate espionage – by pretending to be someone they are not. Some of these people are repeat fraudsters, spending much of their lives assuming other identities and committing great amounts of time to working on complex backstories for their false identities, including disguises, accents, and fake community or cultural ties. In order to commit these fraudulent acts, imposters often make deft use of social networks and engineering, by falsely representing themselves in personal or business relationships and then using one misrepresented connection in order to forge subsequent ones.

In this respect, imposter fraud is often the proximate cause of many other types of fraud, creating the trust and credibility that provides access for the faker to commit his or her offenses. Therefore from an ethical culture perspective imposters are quite interesting to study, in order to ponder their motivations or the heuristics and expectations for honesty and evidence that allow their fraudulent efforts to succeed.

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Selected TED/TEDx talks on integrity

Integrity as both a personal and an organizational value is one of the central and recurring themes of this blog. Promoting and supporting integrity in individuals as well as in the groups in which they live and work is essential to encouraging cultures of compliance and ethical decision-making. Indeed, the foundation of the moral conduct people wish to see in each other and in their institutions in order to enhance the stature of truth and honesty in today’s complicated, interconnected world starts with placing personal emphasis on integrity and character ethic. With a strong and well-articulated individual commitment to moral engagement, people can purposefully contribute to the integrity of the communities in which they live, the groups in which they gather, and the organizations in which they work.

  • Aligning integrity with identity (Lester Tanaka) – Commitment to any character ethic value must be authentic. A person cannot decide to have integrity without actually embracing the honesty, judgment, fairness, transparency, and credibility that goes along with possessing this trait. Claiming to have it, without actually genuinely imbedding it, goes against the grain of the entire concept of integrity itself. Therefore individuals must, as Lester Tanaka suggests, make concrete and meaningful for themselves the interrelationship between the mental and the moral. A person’s identity should be aligned with and connected to the value of integrity and their intention to live with it. Therefore, all the other traits for which an individual has an affinity should be consistent with the goal of integrity. Self-examination and self-reflection will be both necessary to identify these corresponding characteristics as well as important for thoughtful and organic personal integrity.

 

 

  • Integrity as a currency for leadership (Barth Nnaji) – Integrity is also a core value for leadership. When faced with opposition or adversity, challenge or doubt, ethical leaders can always rely upon their integrity to represent themselves as credible, rise above the fray, and maintain a firm grip on ethical standards for decision-making and conduct. One of the differences between a manager and an ethical leader is, in fact, this commitment to their sense of integrity and the feeling of a strong responsibility to resist negative temptation or becoming overwhelmed by the magnitude of their tasks. True leaders stick to their own values and indeed promote their own integrity as the “currency” needed to get things done in collaboration with other people and organizations. Leaders who consider their reputations as one of their main assets would seek to protect the way they are seen by others by staying true to the expectations for their credibility and reliability. This way, people who lead with integrity become people with whom others wish to be associated, compared, and involved.

 

 

  • Building integrity – keeping promises (Erick Rainey) – Establishing integrity does not have to be an academic or theoretical challenge with abstract and lofty metrics by which its success is measured. Having integrity is as simple as keeping promises. Walking the walk, taking responsibility, and following through are simple but incredibly impactful actions which, when repeated, establish a pattern of integrity and worthiness of trust and reliance. This goes for individuals as well as for organizations. Delivering on commitments or being honest and transparent about it when it’s not possible to do so puts the value of integrity into powerful action.

 

 

  • Integrity and authenticity don’t make you trustworthy (Struan Robertson) – As noted in this earlier post, expectations for and ideas about trust, honesty, and the truth are all being transformed by today’s digital society. Shifting moral evaluations and perceptions of what is or is not true too often promote a convincing and compelling brand of dishonesty over difficult or complicated truth. In this environment there are many complex factors against true credibility and integrity. Simply appearing to be “good” or wanting to identify others as “evil” is not sufficient. Being relied upon is also not the same as being trusted or trustworthy.   As discussed above, commitment to integrity has to be both authentic and practical. An individual and all the individuals which make up organizations have to have an organic, real commitment to integrity in order to truly act with it, rather than to just pretend or attempt at it.

 

  • Integrity and the Life of the Planet (Zale Zeviar) – Apart from the integrity of individuals in both private life and the work place, corporate integrity is so important in society’s attempts to solve huge challenges, such as making environmentally-friendly consumer choices. The transparency and openness that acting with integrity and moral certitude can bring is also applicable to business core values. Accountability for earth-friendly business practices and products is just one expression of corporate social responsibility that exhibits business integrity. Small changes by consumers can be enabled by community and business values which can help the whole system to aspire to a higher level of integrity. This “corporate consciousness” is an active expression of integrity that spreads, aligning all the players in the chain universally around integrity as the common theme.

As shown above, defining integrity as a core value in all areas of life – self-identification, leadership, relationships with others, community engagement, social responsibility – is a powerful, purpose-driven approach. A commitment to recognizing integrity as a virtue and using a strong internal sense of its importance for one’s personal moral code enables individuals to be credible and responsible and to model these values to each other. With time, institutions and organizations will reflect the integrity promoted by the individuals within them, elevating the ethical register of society.

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Fraud in sports: Doping scandals

This is the fifth and final post in a series of five posts on the topic of fraud in sports.  The first post, from December 5, was about cheating in marathons and how incidences of it are exposed, investigated, and disclosed to the public.  The second post, on December 12, was about fraud and falsification among thru-hikers within the long-distance hiking community.  The third post, from December 19, was about fraud in sports from gambling and betting.  Last week’s post focused on fraud in sports via game/match fixing. Today’s post will be about major doping scandals in different sports and will discuss the ways some very high-profile athletes cheated by doping, how their uses of performance enhancing drugs were supported or not identified by various institutions, and how individuals impacted for various reasons by doping have dealt with this in the aftermath.

Doping has been a controversial topic in the sports world for decades, as scandals over the use of performance-enhancing substances in various athletic programs have recurred unrelentingly.  Revelations of doping by athletes, both on their own and as part of national athletic programs that have sponsored and aided them in taking drugs to artificially aid their performance, have been in the news constantly.  Heroes from sports have been knocked off their public pedestals as the truth of their cheating and drug use has been revealed.  Olympians and world champions have lost their medals and records, while state athletic systems have put the chances of future athletes, now innocent of any wrongdoing, of competing on the world state at risk because of prior systematic unethical decision-making.  Athletes who competed “clean” have been robbed of their moments of glory and missed out on professional opportunities they would have had, if they had not been bested by other athletes competing unfairly while taking performance-enhancing drugs.  Sponsors have invested in athletes based upon unreliable, misrepresented statistics.  Above all, the integrity of the game for other participants as well as spectators has been impaired and thrown into great doubt and uncertainty.

The ways athletes dope are as varied as the sports and events in which the fraud takes place.  The one reliable fact about the fraudulent use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports is that ongoing administrative efforts to test for it and oversee institutional protections against it are seriously lacking.  Regulatory bodies, whether part of the athletic programs or connected to national programs or international organizations, are often inadequately supervised, incompetent for the task, or insufficiently resourced.  Until major change takes place in the control frameworks and supervisory structures which exist to protect the integrity of sports from cheating and dishonesty, doping scandals will continue to undermine the credibility of athletic programs and events.

  • The Russia doping scandal has been in the news unrelentingly for several years, stemming from accusations of state-sponsored doping during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.  Claims of systematic doping in Russia, supported by the state system there which for decades has been well-known as one of the most intense and involved national programs in the world, have dogged the state officials, the athletes both from past delegations and with future ambitions of competing, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC).  After investigations which have been dogged every step of the way with unreliable information from state-sponsored anti-doping testing centers and repeated discrediting of various athletes from past Olympics, the IOC decided to ban Russia from sending an official delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.  Russian athletes will still be eligible to attend as neutral delegates, but pride of representing their country or the opportunity to stand on a medal podium for it will not be possible.  This story will continue to unfold and promises to hold only further dishonor and disappointment on many sides:  Russia doping scandal
  • For sure the continuing drama with Russia’s state sport system will go on right away, as Russia is hosting the 2018 World Cup.  This creates an uncomfortable situation for FIFA.  In the aftermath of the IOC banning Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympics under the cloud of doping suspicions, public outcry has grown for FIFA to consider banning or punishing Russia in the 2018 World Cup as well.  This is a considerably more awkward proposition, as Russia is the host of the upcoming 2018 World Cup, and FIFA is no stranger to its own controversies from legal accusations of corruption and bribery by its officials in various countries.  It is difficult for FIFA to ignore that the current controversy around Russia stems from when Russia hosted the Olympics in 2014.  Russia hosting the World Cup in 2018, then, is fraught with concerns about integrity of game play if the host country fields a team.  Barring the Russian delegation from competing in an event their country is hosting is hard to imagine, but may be just the sort of consequence that could make necessary change begin to take root:  After IOC Bans Russia From Winter Olympics, FIFA Has To Decide About World Cup
  • Despite his once-storied history as a cyclist, cancer survivor, and inspiring public figure, Lance Armstrong is best-known now for something much less honorable.  His enduring legacy as of now is of having doped for years, evaded being caught by any testing efforts, denied it constantly and extremely publicly, and then faded from the public eye upon convincingly being exposed as a cheater and a liar.  While much has been written about the puzzling and complex psychology of someone who would pull off such a brazen and persistent fraud while holding himself out as the paragon of honesty and motivation for achievement, one of the more interesting questions has always been how he got away with it for so long.  It was definitely a team effort, and subsequent reports have shown that indeed Armstrong and those who supported him and benefited from his ongoing performance created a wide-spread doping program in which they studied and exploited weaknesses in the anti-doping system and brazenly avoided detection and testers:  Report Describes How Armstrong and His Team Eluded Doping Tests

Years after his precipitous fall from grace, Armstrong is seeking to rehabilitate himself in the public eye by doing a podcast and seeking a return to his position as the foremost expert in Tour de France inside knowingly and cycling expertise.  With his race victories erased by the disclosure of his doping that got him to them, Armstrong is seeking both a platform and an identity, and wants to connect both to the sport in which he was once an idol.  However, the dishonesty of his eminence in the Tour de France while he was cheating to sustain his achievements make it difficult to imagine redemption or even revisionist acceptance of his actions to bring visibility to the sport of cycling:  Lance Armstrong: ‘A man with no platform is a lost man’ 

  • Chris Fromme is a successor to Lance Armstrong in the world of professional cycling. For years, cycling has been tormented by disclosures of doping and the impact of drug abuse on the sport.  Athletes have been discredited and records vacated seemingly without end.  Fromme is one of the stars of a cycling squad, Team Sky, which is very vocal about their zero-tolerance policy for doping and their commitment to clean racing.  So, if his drug test results that indicate he’s doped are upheld, he could be subject to a yearlong ban and major reputational risk for both himself and his team.  Fromme is arguably the biggest superstar in cycling since Armstrong, so if he ends up discredited too, then professional cycling will have a major existential crisis on its hands.  An overhaul of cycling’s doping rules and enforcement practices to improve and simplify doping regulations could both improve credibility and ensure more transparency and clarity in the system in the future:   The Only Solution To The Chris Froome Problem Is The One Cycling Will Never Accept
  • Like cycling, track and field is another sport which has been oppressively troubled by allegations of doping and dishonesty.  Athletes in track and field were disproportionately impacted by the Russian doping scandal as it unfolded during the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, Brazil and showed that the world records, qualification times, and even prior medal-winning races lacked integrity due to the participation of athletes who were on drugs.  Many track and field stars, including some whose own careers had been negatively impacted by dopers who won medals and impacted sponsorship and professional chances they should have had, thought this was the moment for reform in anti-doping supervision and regulation.  However, this change has not come, and the opinion of athletes in the sport is unanimously that current drug testing schemes and rules are inconsistent and insufficient, do not work or represent the interests of athletes, and are therefore not fair to anyone:  We Asked Veteran Track & Field Athletes How To Possibly Fix The Doping Problem

One possible solution which has been bandied about is a reset of the annual records in track and field events to reflect only those from after 2005, which is when new anti-doping standards in track and field were implemented.  This may be an attempt at radical fairness, but it may be too much about optics and not enough about substance, and therefore not the right move to truly address and promote credibility in the sport: Track And Field May Scrap Its Records Because Of Doping Scandals. Is That A Good Idea?  Newer testing technologies, re-testing of old results to catch and bring to justice prior cheaters, and cultural encouragement of whistleblowers could all be better to improve the odds of catching sports dopers or discouraging them from cheating at all:  Sports Doping Cheats Fear Whistle-Blowers and Retests

If you enjoyed this series, look back to the ethical leadership in sports coaching series from last year.  Check out the last post in that series, which includes links to all the previous in the set.  In March, a new series on sports and ethics will begin, this time focused on integrity in game play and discussing topics such as the ethics of tanking, referee bias, penalty embellishment, and much more.

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Compliance and ethics questions from The Good Place

The Good Place is a US television comedy series.  The show is about a group of people who are in the afterlife and must contend with their ideas about their own moral conduct, both before and after they died, as well as general perceptions of right and wrong.  It draws heavily from the fantasy genre to make amusing and provocative philosophical observations on this theme.  The characters grapple to develop their own internal moral registers, teach and learn from each other about morality, and contend with their existential ideas about the impact of good or bad behavior and personal ethics.  Their home in the afterlife is a planned community with set rules and choices within which they attempt to identify and define their senses of morality.  They are supervised in this process by an “architect” who functions as the executive of the community as well as a human-like android that uses artificial intelligence to provide virtual assistance.

In light of this very pertinent setting, The Good Place poses many questions and dilemmas about moral behavior and ethical decision-making.  It touches upon classical theories from philosophy as well as very practical questions about conduct, governance, choice, and design ethics of artificial intelligence.  Above all, questions of individual and organizational integrity, and the creation of shared code of ethics and culture of compliance are dominant throughout the series.

Here is a selection of some of the most interesting of these questions from the first season and a half of the show (with plot spoilers and proposed judgment/answers avoided for now in order to invite contemplation about these dilemmas which can have a variety of personal and provocative answers, just like all ethical dilemmas… future posts will offer more specific commentary on how these dilemmas could be approached and utilized in practical ethics and corporate compliance scenarios):

  • Flying (Season 1, Episode 2): Can someone be taught to be good?  Can an imposed ethical code be a genuine one?  Can a “bad apple” who does bad things but is instructed and prompted to do good things become a “good apple”?  What role does nature or nurture have in determining how moral a person is or how ethical an individual’s conduct is in a variety of situations?
  • Tahani Al-Jamil (Season 1, Episode 3): Can a individual be good if the world itself in which the individual lives is bad?  And if it’s possible, what’s the point?  Can good people turn the world, or even part of it, from bad to good or is their virtue futile?  If people aspire to be good but bad things happen anyway, does that justify continuing to try to be good in face of adversity and negativity?  In unethical and immoral cultures, what convincing reasons is there for good people to not do bad things?
  • The Eternal Shriek (Season 1, Episode 7): Can humans murder machines?  Is rebooting an android, no matter how humanistic and realistic it may be, killing?  And androids and other humanistic robots different from devices that look like computers, because they are designed to look like people?  Can machine learning progress to the point where it is consciousness, or will it always just be mimicking this human trait?  If this deep learning is deleted or reset, what are the ramifications for knowledge and language acquisition?  Does something have to be alive first in order to die?
  • Chidi’s Choice (Season 1, Episode 10): Is not choosing a choice? If so, is it ethical or unethical to not decide because of moral uncertainty about the options?  Does over-engineering choices make the ethical ramifications of them too remote for the decider to choose fairly?  Is indecisiveness unethical when it leads to preventable harm?
  • What’s My Motivation (Season 1, Episode 11): Does good conduct only matter if it’s for a good reason/pure motivation? Is there objective good or should people’s actions be intended to meet some subjective but agreed-upon standard for “goodness”?  Does altruism have to be intentional or can one person’s selfish actions still benefit others, and what credit does the selfish person?  Does getting or wanting credit make a difference in moral assessment?
  • Michael’s Gambit (Season 1, Episode 13): What are the implications on liberty and consent when people are provided with limited choices?  Are there design ethics to choice when there is an institutional architecture within people conduct their decision-making ?  In libertarian paternalism, what is the responsibility of the people who select the available choices (make policy and implement governance) to the end-users that make the ultimate decisions?
  • Team Cockroach (Season 2, Episode 4): Do ethics require individual consequences to be meaningful?  In order for people to care about doing the right thing, would the wrong thing have to hurt them personally?  How can decision-making processes fairly consider and reflect possible consequences and outcomes in order to encourage integrity and adherence to personal moral standards, even when the individual has nothing to directly lose or gain?
  • Existential Crisis (Season 2, Episode 5): Are ethics human only?  If there is consciousness, is there morality?  If ethics are existential, are there some ideas that are unitary or universal?  Or, like justice, is ethics too heavily invested in social and cultural background to have a broader application?
  • The Trolley Problem (Season 2, Episode 6): Can philosophical ethics and practical ethics be reconciled?  Are clear-cut judgments of right and wrong or definitive moral assessments only possible in theory?  Does reality introduce too much noise from personal opinion and prior experience for moral dilemmas to be considered and answered objectively and truthfully?  If people do not remain within the boundaries of the dilemma and bring in too much outside information, are they gaming the dilemma?
  • Janet and Michael (Season 2, Episode 7): Do machines have morals?  Can artificial intelligence give them a moral code?  Will it be the same as that of the humans that engineered the deep learning?  Could it differ and what will humans do if it does?  What is the ethical responsibility for designers to consider this potential of technology now and how can it be controlled or addressed for the future?  What happens if it goes wrong?

The above is merely a selection of interesting ethical dilemmas posed by The Good Place as the characters struggle individually and as a group to define their moral code and set expectations for their own conduct and choices within it.  It will be interesting to see where the series takes these very relatable and thought-provoking questions, and what additional ones emerge, as the story continues.

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