Using Dialogue for Emotional Compliance

Summary

Most ethics and compliance codes are developed with legal defense in mind, as "Exhibit One" against future litigation. Yet everyone knows the best rules never achieve behavioral compliance simply because they are the best. The members of an organization may "sign off" with their hands, yet never emotionally, intellectually, or behaviorally "sign on" with their hearts. Careful, artful organizational discussion can help more and more members come on board in ethics compliance.

Attitudes About Rules

The phrase, rule-breaker, has a nasty ring for us in certain contexts.  If we are organizational leaders or HR managers, we do not like rule-breakers.  People who do not abide by the rules almost inevitably become trouble-makers. 

Some people have more or less compliant personality types.  They enjoy conforming and fitting in.  Others seem to resist conformity by nature, and enjoy pushing boundaries as evidence of their individualism.  Whatever our fundamental attitude to rules in general, many of them often were shaped in us as children.

Other attitudes towards rules are shaped by later experiences in life.  A person who never fastened his seat belt begins fastening it--and makes sure all passengers are fastened in--after a best friend was killed.  A basically good and honest person with a bad supervisor decides to break some rules because anger and retaliation overruled the the rules.

Leadership Approaches to Rule Attitudes

Some for-profit leaders and HR managers focus only on behavioral outputs.  "Pain gets the gain."  They do not invest time on motives and attitudes for ethics compliance.  They put out the rules, wait for the breakers, then punish according to the rulebook.

This seems logical, reasonable, and economical, particularly in a bad economy. "There are a 1000 waiting for your job, so I dare you...." This is the Hamburger Approach. Hamburger can be eaten, cooked, allowed to rot, or thrown away. When HR managers view their labor pool as an endless supply of consumables, they make a huge mistake.

Leaders and managers who take the Hamburger Approach are not wise, though some employment attorneys absolutely love them. Why? People are living beings with emotions, attitudes, and behavioral capacities to express those emotions and attitudes. Abuse them, ignore them, and they will respond in some way.

A single person with a bad attitude towards organizational rules can generate losses--active or passive--in hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of dollars. Multiply the total of potential persons (within or outside) an organization with potential bad attitudes towards rules. Multiply this potential total by the total number of rules potentially broken (written and unwritten).

Dialogue for "Compliance Attitude Adjustment"

Given the right, guided opportunity, members in an organization not only can "vent" their frustrations and attitudes. They also can be the sole "front-line" sources to get the pulse of other rule-breakers. Every leader (not using the Hamburger Approach) wants to tap into the entire organizational membership to learn:

• what rules and compliance measures are good and working
• what applications are not working or even unwelcome
• what new rules and edits can improve the organization
• what trouble spots/groups in the organization need special help

The wise organizational leader will critically, reflectively, carefully design dialogue to create a data stream that is helpful; increases production, efficiency, and loyalty; and, reduces rule-breaking and rule-avoidance harmful to the organization.

Leadership Ethics Forum:

Generate Meaningful Dialogue

The Leadership Ethics Forum is a tool designed and controlled by management to enable:

• management-generated dialogue on ethics/compliance
• full or selected group dialogues on any subjects
• immediate-edit capabilities as data emerges
• ethics, rule, compliance research/policy-making acceleration
• litigation rapid-response data stream

The Leadership Ethics Forum is a third party service.  We keep confidential the identities of all participants. We also assist organizations in identifying and designing dialogue tools for use in the LEF to produce rich, adaptable, implementable information.  We work with HR and legal teams to ensure that dialogue tools are "in-sync" with organizational needs at any given time.

Contact us at info@leadershipethicsonline.com.  Send us an email including the following information:  (1) "Leadership Ethics Forum" in the subject line; (2) your name and official responsibilities; (3) context or situation prompting contact; and (4), all contact information.  We will respond promptly to such inquiries.

Fear of Termination: Effects on Leadership Style and Decisions

Summary

Fear of termination affects leadership style and decisions. Fear affects our perceptions--of ourselves and others.  Fear affects our interpretations of past and prevent events. Fear affects and drives other emotions.  Fear distorts our thinking and decision-making.  Fear makes us someone other than our normal selves.  In all our relationships at work or at home, fear is to be feared for its harmful effects.  Fear, prolonged and chronic, harms our physical health.   With all this said, fear also can be our ally.

The Economy:
Fact-Based Fear

Fear of termination grows directly in proportion to the U.S. economy's decline, in many industries.  Some organizations thrive in bad times.  For most organizations, our bad economic times mean the quest for survival, trimming expenses, including staffs.  When the economy was strong, leaders usually were last to be cut, if ever.  They were the decision makers.  Now, however, organizational survival itself becomes the guillotine to chop off entire departments and their heads.  Anyone who believes he or she is indispensable needs a mental examination.  Termination is a real possibility for all.

Fear:
HR's Bludgeon in Bad Times

Many owners and HR managers see bad times as their friend. Fear of termination makes for a very quiet, cooperative workplace with higher outputs. Everyone knows the score.  "Break a rule and you're gone, for 1,000 are ready to take your place."  This now also applies to people in leadership positions.  As a result, fear of termination escalates office politics, cutthroat betrayal, and career assassination.  "I'll take out any who might threaten my place."

Fear of termination in a bad economy often becomes an unethical tool for both management and labor.  Bad managers use fear of unemployment to crush legitimate health and safety concerns, and silence complaints about real conditions.  Bad employees are driven by fear of unemployment to misrepresent work output information to favor themselves.  Bad salaried and hourly workers spent hours "creatively" finding ways to make themselves secure, at any cost.

Fear:
Organizational Cancer

Fear creates in us the "fight or flight" response.  In organizational context, fear creates in everyone a dysfunctional and destructive mix.  Emotions surge.  Thinking becomes polluted and distracted.  Speech becomes needlessly aggressive, or artificially sweet.  Behaviors go all over the map.

Reports of all kinds become pawns in a chess game anticipating future disciplinary appeals, or lawsuits.  Misrepresentation, lies, become more common than truth.  This is the "flight" aspect of the fear response.  Unfair or bad treatment, subtle or overt career assassination, alliance-building, become expressions of the "fight" aspect of the fear response.

Nazi concentration camp life showed how fear of termination--death--drove some good Jews to collaborate with Nazi captors; to become cruel overseers; and, to do things to both Jews and Gentiles their Jewish faith forbade.  Fear can make people into monsters, hidden right in any organization.

Leadership Ethics Forum:

Harness and Control Fear

Fear exists.  You know that.  You probably have fear within you.  The wise owner and manager, who values both organization and people, fears uncontrolled fear and harnesses and controls it.
 
The Leadership Ethics Forum is a tool designed and controlled by management to enable:

• confidential, anonymous, safe, non-retaliatory communications
• all employees to share their personal fears--reducing them
• employees with special information on dangerous situations to share that
• research data to reduce fear, increase efficiency and trust in each other

The Leadership Ethics Forum is a third party service.  We keep confidential the identities of all participants. People can share fears and fear-producing situations in safety. The LEF produces relief, gratitude, trust, collaboration, teamwork--and can reveal dangerous conditions for litigation.

Contact us at info@leadershipethicsonline.com.  Send us an email including the following information:  (1) "Leadership Ethics Forum" in the subject line; (2) your name and official responsibilities; (3) context or situation prompting contact; and (4), all contact information.  We will respond promptly to such inquiries.

Parental Influences on Leadership and Subordinate Capacities

Summary

Whatever age we are, we are adults. We think of ourselves as adults. We have been making adult decisions for a long time. There are thousands of signs in our lives we are adults. Our parents may be alive, or one is deceased, or both are gone. Yet there is a real sense in which we forever will be our parents' children. That is, our parents had enormous impacts on how we see ourselves, others, the world--and how we are to relate to ourselves, others, and the world. This also applies to our adult roles as leaders.

Your Childhood "Leader Models":
Mom and Dad

As a dependent child, you first learned how to become a follower. Your first leaders were your parents. By "parents" I mean the adults who invested their love and years of support to get you "raised up." We really need to reflect on those first, central people in our lives as children. Let's assume one of these parents had a more dominant influence.

Some were gentle, nudging and guiding. Some were harsh, pushing and forcing. Some were listeners, asked us to speak, reflected, then responded to what we said. Some were constant talkers, uninterested in our view, told us to shut up and do what we were told.

Make a list of what you remember--good, not so good, and just plain bad--from the first leaders you ever had in your life. Take your time. This exercise may be more meaningful to you than you imagine now.  Some things your parents taught you will need to be kept.  Other things need to be discarded, as soon as possible.

Your Childhood "Follower Skills":
Mom and Dad's Rules and Laws

If your parental leaders encouraged you to take initiative and explore, to "trust yourself," you became a creative follower. If your parental leaders treated you with respect, even as a child, you became a follower with a respectful nature. If your parental leaders bullied you with their sheer size and power, you learned to be a follower who never expresses yourself, who internalizes your thoughts, fears, and resentments.

Even as a leader, you must report to your supervisor as a subordinate follower. Many of your earliest skills learned as a child will reappear in your follower-style, for good or ill.

Parental Influences:
Powerful at Any Age

We may have leadership libraries with hundreds of books. We may have degrees and certificates on our walls as proofs of our intellectual education and training. We may hold high positions in the organization where we are now, and be highly compensated for it.

Nevertheless, our first adult leaders were our first role models--we lived with every day and night for years--of "what to do or not to do when in charge." For most of us, we have mixed memories, and a mixed assessment of their leadership. They also were the first ones to mold our behaviors to their expectations, and for their approval or disapproval.

Never underestimate, when you look at all your adult achievements on the wall, your parents' lifelong influence on you as a leader and follower. Whether they are living or dead now, you "graduated" from their school of leadership. The really adult, reflective leader (and follower):

• grasps this fundamental truth
• uses this truth to discover the positive and negative "leader-follower" principles deep within
• works to develop the good principles, and to be aware when the bad principles emerge "from nowhere" (within)
• accepts that to be an adult leader also means growing and developing beyond our parental examples, for the sake of our families, friends, and coworkers

Leadership Ethics Forum:

Speaking Your Inner Thoughts 

Would it not be a wonderful exercise for you to have the privilege of a private and confidential, guided and non-judgmental reflection on:

• your parents' examples as leaders (and as followers of others)?
• your parents' effects on you as leader and follower?
• your challenges today as a leader and follower in the light of these things?

You can do this through your own Leadership Ethics Forum.  Yet, if you have the authority to recommend or make it happen, your entire organization also can benefit from this, the very same way.

• private and confidential
• guided and non-judgmental 

Contact us at info@leadershipethicsonline.com, and put "Leadership Ethics Forum" in the subject line.  Inquiries including (1) name, (2) official title/responsibilities, (3) factual basis for interest, and (4) contact information--email and direct phone access--will receive prompt attention.

Ethics and Compliance: Needs, Problems, Approaches, Solutions

Summary

We know ethics and compliance can and do work in organizations.  We have thousands of years of history to support this.  Yet the historical perspective is deceptive.  In previous generations, there was greater homogeneity in groups' ethical values, rules, expectations, and stricter punishments for certain ethics and compliance breach.   Today's recent history gives another, more troubling picture.  Both management and labor appear capable of unethical, non-compliant, illegal behaviors.  Now owners and managers must create homogeneity for ethics and compliance in all personnel.

Diversity Is the Rule

Human organizations bring together diverse individuals for a common purpose.  In itself, this is amazing.  Look at only a few of the differences in members of an organization:

• born different years, months, days, and times
• born in different nations, with different languages and traditions
• born to different parents, with their own values, beliefs, personalities, habits
• given different diets and physical regimens
• developed different self-images, feedback from parents/siblings
• experienced ALL THEY HAVE prior to coming into the organization
• bring with them their personal ethical values and behavioral habits

Yet day in, day out, organizations continue to function, in general, rather well.  Given all the diversity, given all the people involved--every one a single moral agent capable of doing anything at a moment's notice--this is almost miraculous.  Why do we not have more organizational problems than we do?

This is a testimony for large numbers of human beings--each one a unique individual--to engage singly and collectively in self-control, self-regulation, and collaboration and cooperation with other people.

Motives for self-regulation and collaboration vary, from the "paycheck" to "pleasing God," from hope for a "certificate of recognition" to avoiding "Third-Strike-You're-Out" and prison.

Past:
Ethical Homogeneity

For thousands of years, governments and organizations had "piggy-back rides" on the backs of various religious or philosophical systems. The writers of the Bible, Greek philosophers like Aristotle, and even American founders like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, all understood the positive role of religions to promote honesty, character, and social cohesion.

From Moses to Jesus to Muhammad, from Zoroaster to Buddha to K'ung-fu-tzu (Confucius), hundreds of millions of people--past, present, future--have their "ethics and compliance core" sown, grown, shaped, and fruitful from all the religious and philosophical systems of the world. These include the variants of political theorists like Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

As someone once truly said, "It is easier to tear down than build up." The historic foundations for much ethics and compliance has been torn down over the past one hundred years.

Present:
Ethical Subjectivism and Relativism

Ethics and compliance are up for grabs in the minds of many people. The oldest generations of Americans with clear and firm ethics and compliance systems are dying off. There is evidence to suggest younger generations have had less ethics and compliance values and education, training and practice.

This spells trouble for organizations seeking honest, diligent, loyal, trustworthy members and employees. When individual ethics are egocentric and hedonism--"All For Me and My Pleasure"--everyone else potentially is a victim. Too many individuals believe organizationally-harmful ideas like:

• "Get all you can, while you can"
• "If you can get away with it, do it"
• "Do unto others before they do unto you"
• "Whomever has the gold makes the rules"
• "Lie when you need to, blame when you want to"

What Some Managers Do:
Turn the Crank, Use the Door

Organizations have a mission to achieve. They seek and hire persons to execute the mission. They wish to invest minimal resources of time, personnel, and money to shape persons for the mission. They do NOT exist mainly to "create ethical homogeneity."

In hard times, many seek the minimal requirement of ethics compliance to achieve the mission. There are no extra funds for education and growth. Many believe, "You cannot make an ethical silk purse out of a sow's ear" (or some other porcine part). The task becomes "hire-and-fire" until good employees are found by an essentially impersonal, mathematical process of elimination.

The Leadership Ethics Forum:

Ethics and Compliance Assistant

Every organizations wants to reduce turnover. Every organization would like to learn what both management and labor think about ethics and compliance: policies, practices, and hidden dangers known to some but not all. The LEF does what no HR or Legal personnel can do--obtain from the entire organizational membership:

1. WHAT THEY THINK ethical, compliance, and legal subjects;
2. FRESH CONCURRENT data, potentially within one (1) hour of disclosure;
3. COMPLETELY HONEST disclosures, because fear of retaliation is gone.

Properly designed, deployed, and monitored, the LEF can acquire early, eager, candid, full cooperation of all organizational members--for the benefit of the entire group. Consider the LEF today.

Contact us by email atinfo@leadershipethicsonline.com. (1) Put "Leadership Ethics Forum" in the subject line; (2) provide your name and official responsibilities, (3) briefly give the basis for interest; and (4), submit contact information. These inquiries will receive prompt attention.