NDDCEL PDF Packet

ethicalleadership.nd.edu

Thank you for your interest in the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership. Enclosed you will find a description of our outlook and how we aim to serve, a few select writeups from our To the Point: Dispatches from the Ethical Frontier research series, and a collection of takeaways from our most recent forum. To see our multimedia content including our Walking the Talk: Putting Insights into Practice CEO interview series, please visit us at ethicalleadership.nd.edu.

Our Standpoint 1

Increasing Your Odds 2 - 3

Making Feedback Normal 4 - 5

Why Ethics Education Needs to Stay Positive 6 - 7

Hiring for Guilt 8 - 9

The Power of Storytelling 10 - 11

Breakthrough Behaviors: Takeaways from our 4th Annual Forum 12 - 14

Ethical leadership is the bedrock on which enduring, successful organizations are built. If you have integrity at the helm, committed employees, a culture that supports your values, and the public’s trust, you’re a lot better off. Your company is strong internally, and that’s not only good for you—it’s good for your industry, your community, and the global market.

Yet every discussion of ethics seems to start with a litany of wrongdoings—from judgment lapses to outright fraud, the focus is on the bad things people and companies have done.

At the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership, we see ethics as more than just a safety net that catches us when we fail. We believe it can be a powerful force in driving the world forward.

Our Center arose from a partnership between the University of Notre Dame and the professional services firm Deloitte. Having identified a shared value of personal integrity in today’s business world, we developed the NDDCEL as a forum by which to advance the understanding and implementation of ethical leadership practices in the corporate sphere.

We deal in ideas—not just about business or management or how to train employees, but also about the human mind, behavioral science, culture, interpersonal exchange, and personality theory. We explore how people work, how their individual traits and ideas and actions make larger organizations work, and how leaders can affect culture and inspire their followers. We’re interested in a lot of things here at NDDCEL, and they’re not just the things you would expect.

So, how do we aim to serve you? From our diverse interests, we fund original research projects and search for and synthesize content from the academic and business worlds into “dispatches” for your consumption. We show you what we’ve found, tell you why we think it matters, and give you ideas on how to use the information. We provide forward-looking, pragmatic, and provocative content to assist you in bettering your organizations and, ultimately, in making business a force for good.


Here’s how we do that:

• Produce a video series of interviews with C-Suite executives discussing values

• Create accessible, pragmatic writeups of cutting edge behavioral research

• Present content at various forums and conferences on ethical business behavior

• Contribute thought leadership pieces to ethics blogs and business management publications

• Annually convene executives and scholars around innovative topics in ethical leadership

• Award funding to academics pursuing research projects on ethical behavior and leadership

• Identify ethics centers with shared interests and form collaborations to create valuable content

• Publish a monthly newsletter with fresh content and updates on Center activity

1

OUR STANDPOINT

TO THE POINT

The words that sealed the terrible fate of the Challenger crew might seem innocuous: “Take off your engineer’s hat and put on your manager’s hat.”

NASA was working with a contracted en-gineering firm on the 1986 space shuttle launch. The contractor’s engineers had been warning managers that if the temperature became too cold, O-rings that joined the shuttle to its rocket boosters would fail.

But NASA wanted to launch as soon as pos-sible. That’s when the contractor’s general manager told his fellow executives to con-sider the issue as managers, not engineers. The conversation instantly shifted from one about design and safety to one about bud-gets and deadlines.

And so the mission went forward as scheduled. Seventy-three seconds after it launched, the O-rings did come undone, and the shuttle broke into pieces. Two minutes later, as their cabin hit the water, all aboard were killed.

The lesson of the Challenger explosion—and of the unheeded warnings leading up to it—is not just to listen to engineers. It’s also to make sure we approach important issues through more than one prism, University of Notre Dame ethics researcher Ann Tenbrun-sel says.

Separating what an engineer would recom-mend from what a manager would—rath-er than examining the whole picture—is compartmentalizing. And that leads to what Tenbrunsel and her colleague Max Bazerman call “ethical fading.”

The prism through which a dilemma is viewed, the researchers find, can affect the

Increasing Your Odds

Dispatches from the Ethical Frontier

“People think that they’re acting according to their values, but in fact they’re not,” Tenbrunsel says.

“We find this across the spectrum of people. Situational influenc-es and psychological processes contribute to us not living up to even our own standards. We all fall prey to this.”

Across the spectrum, re-searchers say, we’re all prey to thinking we’re more eth-ical than we really are. The good news is that there are proactive steps businesses can take to avoid common pitfalls.

ethicalleadership.nd.edu 2

Acknowledge ethical illusionsThe first step employees, leaders, and organizations need to take is acknowledging that they most likely hold some illusions about their own ethical behavior. As the great ethicist and philosopher Sissela Bok pointed out in her book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, “If we could rid ourselves of self-de-ceit, we’d be capable of making more a moral decision.”

Be conscious of languageIn one study of ethical behavior within law firms, Tenbrunsel found that attorneys were more likely to use the term “judgment call” when describing an ethically dubious decision. The lesson is to take a hard look at what euphemisms are being used at an organization. Is it cooking the books or “creative accounting?” Firing or “right-sizing?”

Don’t compartmentalize ethicsWe tend to divide business from personal life. And with the rise of corporate compliance officers, that’s become even easier. Employees and managers can cast ethical decisions as the compliance department’s decision, not theirs. Remind all employees that ethics are everyone’s responsibility.

Examine both formal and informal systemsOver and above hotlines, codes of conduct, and ethics trainings, informal forces such as pressure from coworkers, supervisors, and top management can make a huge difference. In Tenbrunsel’s studies, these informal systems explain 10 times as much of the observed misconduct in an organization as formal ones. The takeaway: examine both, paying particularly close attention to departments that are isolated, bread-winning, or perceived as untouchable.

Key Points

Ann Tenbrunsel

outcome for the worse. One study showed that people are more likely to lie after being asked to think about what a business decision entails than after considering what makes an ethical one. “Business can create a context in which ethical behavior is not as likely to occur,” Tenbrunsel explains.

The researchers explain the ethical fading phenomenon in their recent book Blind Spots: Why We Fail To Do What’s Right and What To Do About It. Ethical fading occurs when people are so focused on other aspects of a decision that its ethical implications fade from view.

Based on their findings to date, Tenbrunsel and her fellow researchers recommend these approaches to avoiding ethical fading among individuals and companies.

3ethicalleadership.nd.edu

TO THE POINT

Google’s doing exactly that. At our 4th Annual Forum, we caught up with Mary Kate Stimmler, People Analytics expert at Goo-gle with a PhD in organizational behavior. Stimmler and her team work to understand the entire lifecycle of a “Googler”—from recruitment to compensation to promotions and team dynamics—in order to develop the best possible management system for the tech titan.

As Mary Kate explains, “Every single manager touches every person on their team. And if you can improve how well someone manag-es, how they take that position of authority and how they provide strategy for their team, then you get happier, healthier, more pro-ductive and innovative employees. We asked ourselves, how great would our company be if we had only great managers?” Sounds good, right?

Operating from the premise that the best leaders are the best learners, the People Analytics team decided that what manag-ers really needed in order to improve was the opportunity to get feedback from their team. They designed a platform for regular upward feedback for every manager with a team of three or more people, and thus, the Manager Feedback Survey (MFS) report was born. Twice a year, employees complete an anonymous survey about how their manager performed on specific, actionable items, such

as providing career development coaching. Each manager reviews his or her MFS report and reflects on the data, then schedules a conversation with the team to consider the results. Stimmler notes, “We knew it had to be conversational. Managers needed to hear something out of the mouths of the people they work with every day.” Through dialogue with their teams, managers receive not only a tool for better engagement with their reports’ data, but also a space in which to get more actionable feedback items. For example, if a manager is seeing that she is micromanaging, she can say to her team members, “OK, what does that look like? How can I change that?”

The MFS report works not only to improve

Making Feedback Normal


“Can I give you a little feedback?” It’s something we all hear or say from time to time, and what follows is often accompanied by awkwardness and anxiety on one or both ends of the conversation. But what if we could release the tension and leverage feedback on a more regular basis?

“We asked ourselves, how great would our company be if we had only great managers?”


Make it normalAdd clockwork to your feedback process and make it a regular, predictable part of the year. Google has found that this consistency makes the process more comfortable for employees.

Make it conversational Use the platform to understand how a manager could improve, and then have real, in-person conversations to make the feedback more concrete, more impactful, and more effective.

Make it developmentalEmancipate the tool from evaluative processes, allowing employees to be more comfortable giving feed-back and encouraging managers to be more open to receiving it.

5

Key Points

managerial style; it also functions as a way to empower employees. The People Analytics team has found that these conversations make it 50% more likely that employees feel heard and believe that their feedback will actually impact their manager’s behavior. Mary Kate elaborates on the impact of the reports: “For a moment once at least every six months, the power barrier is lifted, and people can give the feedback they want to give to their managers confidentially without fear of recourse and open up that communication.”

Mary Kate notes three elements of the MFS that have been critical to the success Goo-gle has enjoyed in building their feedback culture. First, it’s normalized. It happens like clockwork every six months, making it a part of the flow of the workplace. Sec-ond, it’s conversational, promoting dialogue between managers and their teams. Third, it’s purely developmental. On this aspect, Stimmler notes, “One of the things we don’t do with our manager feedback is use it to affect punitive action or compensation, and we’ve reinforced that time and time again.” Creating this safe space where people can give feedback without worrying about the consequences allows employees to be more honest and realistic in their responses.

This third element of the tool also empha-sizes the priority Google places on people. Though the results could probably be quite useful in compensation or promotion deci-sions, the People Analytics team protects the data in order to secure the purpose of the survey: making better managers. By insisting

that the results be purely developmental, the team enables Googlers to focus on learning and growth rather than the results’ impact on their careers and compensation. This method promotes communication and open dialogue.

Google has enjoyed so much success with the manager platform that they have begun open-sourcing the tool. Currently, the State of California is working with Google to adapt the platform to its organization. Consider adopting some of Google’s recommenda-tions in your own approach to management and feedback.

“For a moment once at least ev-ery six months, the power barri-er is lifted, and people can give the feedback they want to give to their managers confidentially without fear of recourse and open up that communication”


TO THE POINT

In almost any discussion of business ethics, things start off with a litany of transgres-sions: Enron, Madoff, and on from there. We seemingly can’t help but set the stage by taking about what’s gone wrong. But in her recent research Look at the Bright Side: A Comparison of Positive and Negative Role Models in Business Ethics Education, Denise Baden of the Southampton Management School suggests that this negative emphasis sets a perception of business that may in fact be reducing the likelihood of ethical behav-ior among business students. And if this is happening with students, it may be happen-ing in corporate compliance trainings and workshops as well.

Baden’s interest in the issue of negative and positive examples in business ethics curricula stemmed from the growing dissatisfaction with the ethical effectiveness of business school curriculum. Faced with the recent ethical failings of businesses and the ensuing dire consequences for the global economy, many are calling for a reassessment of how well business schools are educating their students.

Knowing this, Baden designed an experiment to test how negative and positive role mod-els affect students’ ethical behavior inten-tions. The experiment tested two modules of undergraduate business majors for 10 weeks, with each group receiving positive role models (PRMs) for 5 weeks and negative role models (NRMs) for 5 weeks. After the 10 week course, the students completed a survey on the effects of the PRMs versus the NRMs on their perceptions and beliefs.

The results? We need to be more positive when teaching about ethics. Negative exam-ples have their place, but without positive role models, we could be not only failing to teach ethical behavior, but actually increas-ing unethical behavior.

Why Ethics Education Needs to Stay Positive


This negative emphasis sets a perception of business that may in fact be reducing the likeli-hood of ethical behavior among business students. And if this is happening with students, it may be happening in corporate com-pliance trainings and workshops as well.

When designing ethics curriculum, focusing on the examples of failed ethics could actually decrease ethical behavior of students and trainees.


We need to think about how we talk about ethics in business when we’re trying to foster more ethical business leaders. Whether we’re training university students, MBAs, or employees, teaching only the un-ethical side of business can end up perpetuating unethical behavior and silencing those who would speak up if they felt like it would make a difference. In the words of Dr. Denise Baden, we must “walk a fine line between making students aware of possible ethical pitfalls in business, without giving the impression that unethical behavior is the norm.”

Key Points

Denise Baden

Students who received PRMs were inspired, empowered, and optimistic. They believed that being ethical in business was possible, they had ideas on how to do it, and they felt compelled to do it. Their self-efficacy (sense that what they did mattered) was higher, and their descriptive norms about the business world were more positive and ethical. Those students who received the NRMs, on the other hand, had much bleaker outcomes. They were more aware of the consequences of unethical behavior and formed stronger injunctive norms against unethical behavior than did the students who received PRMs, but they also experienced reduced self-ef-ficacy and formed descriptive normative beliefs that business was inherently flawed, and that they could do little to change that.

The two different role models interacted with each other as well, with the PRMs softening the cynicism produced by the NRMs and the NRMs lessening the empowering impact of the PRMs. In the end, the NRMs had a stron-ger emotional impact, and therefore were more affecting than the PRMs. So, what do we take from this? According the Baden’s framework, lower self-efficacy and

negative descriptive norms could mean that the students who receive only NRMs just give up on behaving ethically, or in the worst case, may even engage in “defensive ethics” to avoid being the sucker who follows the rules

and loses while everyone else cheats and wins. Conversely, the students who get PRMs will be more likely to take an ethical stand because they know others have before and they believe it might make a difference.

Negative examples have their place, but without positive role models, we could be not only failing to teach ethical behavior, but actually increasing unethi-cal behavior.

Teaching only the unethical side of business can end up perpetu-ating unethical behavior and si-lencing those who would speak up if they felt like it would make a difference.


TO THE POINT

How can an employer tell if someone is going to behave ethically? Is it the way he thinks? Her social demographics or beliefs? When at-tempting to predict behavior, we oftentimes give people hypothetical ethical dilemmas and test them on how they cognitively work through the issues. But recent research by Taya Cohen, Assistant Professor of Organiza-tional Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mel-lon, suggests that knowing what people will do comes less from knowing how they think and more from knowing who they are.

During her presentation at the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership’s 2014 forum, Cohen explained that it’s more useful for employers to get a sense of someone’s personality when attempting to predict their behaviors. Of note to employers are two of Cohen’s variables: Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB) and Organizational Citizen-ship Behavior (OCB). These two concepts essentially boil down to behavior that harms a workplace versus behavior that elevates a workplace. An employee who demonstrates CWB might show up late, belittle her cowork-ers, or shirk blame for his errors, while an employee who exhibits OCB may help train a coworker, advise or mentor a new hire, or volunteer for projects. Cohen found that, regardless of other factors that might affect workplace conduct (e.g. intention to leave one’s job or interpersonal conflict at work),

one trait predicted these positive or negative behaviors: something she calls “guilt prone-ness.”

Cohen describes guilt proneness as a “pre-disposition to experience negative feelings about personal wrongdoing, even when the wrongdoing is private.” The trait is especially useful because it matters even when you take social monitoring away: people with high guilt proneness seem to have strong internal-ized values, making them more likely to do the right thing, whether or not they have an audience. Cohen states, “public surveillance is not required to prevent moral transgressions; instead, their consciences guide them.”

Hiring for Guilt: How a Simple Test Might Help You Hire More Ethical Employees


Knowing what people will do comes less from knowing how they think and more from know-ing who they are.

Knowing that hiring ethical people means building a better organization, what predictors can savvy employers use to assess a potential employee’s ethical fiber?


As we try to predict and promote ethical behavior, we can’t afford to miss the importance of individual character. When interviewing, companies should consider using character assessment tools. It could mean the difference between strengthening your company from within and hiring a proverbial weak link.

Key Points

Taya Cohen

This is good news to the employer looking to hire. The guilt-prone employee doesn’t need to be policed. She will act ethically because of her character.

The even better news for employers is that Cohen and her colleagues have developed a simple, four-question test that can assess a candidate’s guilt-proneness. The Guilt and Shame Proneness (GASP) test gives inter-viewees hypothetical situations in which they act unethically but are not caught; for

example, keeping extra change that a clerk mistakenly gives them or hiding the fact that they spilled wine on a colleague’s new carpet. It then asks them to imagine their likelihood of feeling guilt about their actions on a scale of 1 to 7, one being very unlikely and 7 being very likely. The results are then tabulated into a distribution of guilt proneness.

But this test was used in laboratory settings where the participants’ answers had no consequences to them. So the question is: Could the test still be useful in a high-stakes personnel selection process? Recent research from Cohen suggests that it could be. When she and her team incorporated the GASP test into intensive psychological testing for applicants to public safety jobs in Colorado, they found that though the results were skewed toward the higher end of the scale, the job applicants whose guilt proneness scores were in the lowest tenth percentile in the sample were deemed unfit for employ-ment by other psychological and behavioral measures. So, in pressurized settings, though people overrepresented their guilt prone-ness, the distribution was still telling.

Though this research must be expanded and repeated before it will be at the stage of implementation in personnel selection pro-cesses, the evidence is encouraging that the GASP test may be a new and important tool for vetting applicants.

The guilt-prone employee doesn’t need to be policed. She will act ethically because of her character.


TO THE POINT

Corporate values can be crucial elements of a company’s ability to encourage ethical deci-sion-making in its employees, or they can just be words on a page. The difference has less to do with how dynamic and comprehensive your trainings are and more to do with the neuroscience of memory.

We intentionally structured our 4th Annual Forum to emphasize experiences, group sharing, and social dialogue. With guidance from Chris Adkins—Executive Director of the Undergraduate Program at the College of William & Mary’s Mason School of Business and NDDCEL board member—we scrapped the usual format of speakers and presenta-tions, opting instead for a somewhat un-conventional tactic: storytelling. This choice augmented our discussion and led to the creation of our vignette-based deliverable. Our experience with our own event was a kind of beta test for a message that we’ve seen frequently in our research: storytelling is the superior way to teach.

There are two neuroscience-backed reasons to use story-telling over memorization in teaching your values. The first is that we make sense of new experiences through the lens of previous experiences, both our own episodes and the episodes of others. In other words, we tend to call upon what we’ve learned through personal experiences and stories than on rote knowledge. The second is that stories provide an evocative, sensory, and meaningful sense of a concept whereas words and paragraph descriptions often lack specificity and emotional impact. Moreover, concepts mean different things to different people, and thus can lead to miscommunica-

tion. Stories offer a richness that helps clarify concepts.

Adkins explains that we are wired to look for patterns when making sense of experiences, connecting the present situation to episodes we have had ourselves or observed in others. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio highlights that our past experiences are tagged with emotions, and such “marking” helps us process our current reality. If the present moment matches past episodes tagged with the emotion of fear, then we are likely to process the current experience through the lens of fear.

This phenomenon relates to the divide be-tween two types of memory: semantic and

The Power of Storytelling


Trainings are ubiquitous in the corporate world. In addition to learning about their actual jobs, employees go through trainings on their organizations’ poli-cies, procedures, norms, strategies, and of course, values. But not all learning is created equal. When it comes to impacting behav-ior, consider leveraging the good old-fashioned power of story.


Leverage the power of storytellingThere are bound to be legends and exemplars at your organization, stories that get told in break rooms and on elevator rides about people who have exemplified leadership, values, or integrity. Harness these stories, crafting them into teachable moments that reinforce your organization’s values, making your com-mitments more salient to your employees.

Use leaders’ experiences to communicate valuesHave senior leaders talk about ethical dilemmas they have faced, but not in a way that eulogizes them. Instead, encourage these leaders to share their thought processes during the decision: why was the choice difficult, what were the feared consequences, and were they tempted to make a choice they knew would be wrong? By giving employees the process of making an ethical decision from the perspective of a leader, you create a cultural context in your organization where difficult issues are more easily discussed.

Promote stories at all levelsReinforce the notion of storytelling as a highly effective method for engagement and reflection across the organization. Use stories to unite cultures around core values in mergers, across different functions of your organization, and among your employees at every level. As stories are shared, individuals are prompted to reflect on their own situation and look for connections across the organization.

Build an ability to make the complex simple through storytellingStories can capture the complexity of situations, and yet can provide a powerful and simple way to com-municate what matters most. Foster in your leaders the habit of communicating important values through simple, concise episodes that clearly illustrate the core values of the organization.

Key Points

episodic. Semantic memory is comprised of facts, general meanings, and concepts. Values, such as integrity and honesty, or codes of ethics, are ideas residing in seman-tic memory. Episodic memory captures our experiences, either those in which we were the main actor or those we have observed. The distinction is important to behavioral ethics because ethical dilemmas are often personal and emotional—when you’re making an ethical decision, you’re not going to your semantic memory, combing through values statements or learned codes. You’re pattern matching your current situation to past experiences.

Stories also offer a better chance at convey-ing your values properly. When he facilitates conversations with executives about their organizations, Adkins begins by asking them to think of a story about a person at their company who exemplifies the “organization at its best” (the company values) and then share the episode with their group. He calls this method the exemplar exercise, and he says that it is powerful because it asks not about a specific value, but about someone or some action that exemplifies a value. The group conversations have immediate energy,

with people sharing and building on each others’ comments. Adkins notes, “The stories provide richer definitions of what the orga-nizational values really mean and reveal how individuals see that value in action inside the organization.” By telling a story of an employ-ee refusing to sell a product he suspected to be faulty and incurring a cost in order to ensure that the product was functional, you much more powerfully represent a compa-ny priority than if you just list “quality” on a sheet of core values. One C-suite executive of a multinational insurance corporation shared with us that his organization avoids even writing down their corporate values, opting instead to have keystone stories that illus-trate each value.

No matter your company’s principles or values, consider employing this method of learning when training employees. As Adkins summarized, “Stories help us see if our values on paper are truly values in practice.” Wheth-er done formally or informally, in new-em-ployee orientation or over a coffee break, employing this strategy of experiential learn-ing will help solidify the culture you’re trying to build in the employees that will ultimately live it.

Chris Adkins


BREAKTHROUGH BEHAVIORS

In March, we brought together 40 corporate leaders and a few hand-picked scholars for an intimate, practical discussion about “breakthrough behaviors”—ways that successful organizations have generated ethical leadership from unexpected angles.

The concept behind our fourth annual forum was that institutional habits and goals can naturally align an organization, allowing it to flourish not only ethically, but also across the enterprise. We framed the discussion around three areas: process, purpose, and people. Experts from varied industries kicked off each topic with their insights. Among them were Google’s Mary Kate Stimmler, a people analytics expert; Jim Quigley, CEO emeritus of Deloitte; General Denny Reimer, retired Army Chief of Staff; Giving Voice to Values founder, Mary Gentile; Keith Darcy, one of the godfathers of the ethics and compliance field; and Perry Minnis, who headed up ethics at Alcoa during Paul O’Neill’s legendary focus on safety.

Our goal was to offer the participants a space in which they could create personalized, concrete takeaways based on the ideas exchanged throughout the event. We wanted them to look inside their own organizations, apply what they heard,

and use it when they got back to their desks. One way we encouraged this was by emphasizing stories, since our brains best remember things that are shared socially—the emotional and relational. The group recounted anecdotes and described exemplars from their own organizations, identifying common threads between and building upon one another’s experiences.

Here’s a sampling of ideas and action items that emerged from the presentations, group discussions, and informal conversations throughout Deloitte University’s campus.

March 23-24, 2015Deloitte University

“A must-attend event. It presents a holistic view of culture, compliance, and ethics from the business and academic perspectives. Valuable information packaged into the perfect amount of time.”


A Focus on People

A Clear Purpose

When communicating values and ethics to employees, acknowledge the reality of their context, come to them from a place of respect for their values, and then create thought experiments. Talk about hypothetical situations, ask them what they would do when confronted with an ethical decision in a certain set of circumstances. By freeing them from the constraints of their immediate realities, you’re giving them the space to be creative. You tap into their aspirations.

Raising issues with peers when you’re a senior leader is tricky—maintaining congenial relationships and balancing egos can leave you knowing what you need to do, but not how to do it. It’s worth thinking about as an executive team and setting norms for those conversations.

Learn how to listen for employees voicing their values to you. Acknowledge that the conversation will be difficult. Show gratitude for their courage, and make action plans to take what they say into account.

Emphasize team impact over individual performance. By framing success as a team pursuit, you foster group accountability and safeguard against exceptionalism and siloing, two fertile grounds for ethical breaches.

As a manager approaching employee feedback and leadership, ask the question, “What do you need from me to succeed?” Looking at the other side of the equation, make sure your employees believe that their feedback will make a difference. If you can gain your employees’ trust that what they say will matter, odds are they will be more

honest, more thoughtful, and ultimately more engaged.

Frame your company values as participatory. You’ll create a sense of team accountability that promotes agency and ultimately unifies the entire enterprise.

Adopt the Aristotelian idea of flourishing when approaching ethics and compliance. Instead of focusing on avoiding bad behavior in employees, complement compliance by encouraging them to be their best selves.

Beware of malicious compliance, or people giving you exactly what you ask for and nothing more. Rather than being rules-focused, be more inclusive—help the people who live the values shape the rules.

A culture of ethical behavior must be led by people committed to ethical principles for their own sake. It can’t be solely about avoiding a lawsuit or the money you make by having a good reputation.

Resist the temptation to create new vision with each new leader. Build on what was great about the former program rather than changing course and starting from scratch.

The Latin root of the word profession shows that it comes from the idea of “committing to something bigger than oneself.” When we ask people what their profession is, do we ever say, “What are you committed to that’s bigger than yourself?” Recognize the obligations associated with being a professional.

When Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski led Team USA to victory in the 2012 Olympics, he had a bunch of high performers. The task of getting them on the same page was an uphill battle. He got it done by having the players themselves make a set of commitments. He didn’t call them rules. He asked, what are the standards we all want to uphold? He created ownership in the team by having the players draw up the list.

Ask yourself: What does it mean to have your company’s name on your business card? What does it mean to be part of this organization? What are your obligations as a member of this team? Compliance can then be linked to a sense of belonging and representation rather than rule-following.

“A great combination of high-ranked and experienced managers, academics and storytellers discussing ethics and values in a very practical way.”


A Good ProcessThere are two kinds of memory: semantic memory, or things you’ve memorized, and episodic memory, the experiences that have taught you to make sense of your environment. When you’re making an ethical decision, you’re not drawing on your semantic memory of values statements or learned codes. You’re pattern-matching. So reconsider how you’re teaching people ethics, and recognize the importance of experiences over learned knowledge.

Leverage the power of storytelling. There are bound to be company legends and exemplars, stories told on the elevator or during company lunches. Harness these stories, crafting them and articulating them to showcase the crucial values of the company. They are teachable moments that reinforce what your organization is all about.

Feedback shapes behavior best if it is both timely and accurate. This way, it can be used to develop intuitions into how to deal with ethical questions. Critically analyze your feedback system and make sure it meets both criteria—you’ll be doing your organization a huge favor.

Retire the strategy of thinking your way into a new way of acting. Instead, focus on acting your way into a different way of thinking. Don’t start by trying to grasp or teach higher-order concepts of integrity and honor. Concrete action around your values can be much more impactful than mental frameworks and semantic lessons.

Don’t just put your values in writing on posters and business cards. Take a page from one CEO’s book and don’t

write them down at all. Instead, tie each value to a story that came out of your organization of when someone exemplified it best.

When you want to change a behavior in your company, tap into a set of habits employees already have and translate it to your new goal. One legal firm, for example, improved its internal operations by appealing to its attorneys’ skill of client care, adopting the maxim: “We treat our colleagues in our fir the same way we treat our best client.”

Have senior leaders talk about ethical dilemmas they faced, but not in a way that makes them heroes. Encourage them to share their thought processes during the decision: why was the choice difficult; what were the feared consequences; were they tempted to make a choice they knew would be wrong? By giving employees the process of making an ethical decision from the perspective of a leader, you create a cultural context in your organization where difficult issues are more easily discussed.

Understand the power of a learning experience versus a training experience. We can be so focused on evaluations and performance reviews that we starve our employees of true learning opportunities, spaces where they can develop without the threat of consequences.

Pay attention to growth mindsets—look for openness to feedback and feedback-seeking. You want high-potential leaders to be hungry for feedback, to have an appetite for growth. (And hey, you might want to

seek it yourself!)

Feedback sessions can be awkward. Try to combat this mood and make feedback normal. Treat it like a conversation, make it systematic, give it a regular rhythm, like clockwork. By creating these habits of feedback, you normalize the process, making it a richer experience for both employees and managers.

Script difficult conversations. Having something tangible around which to organize talking points gives you structure and steadies the interaction.

Create an expectation with your employees that your communications are going to be valuable. Make them believe that it’s going to be insightful, thoughtful, and interactive. Be brief, and put power in your words.

Ask people you train how they define success at the end of the training rather than deciding for them what effective training should be. Why not start with, “How would you consider this to be a useful? You’re giving up time that you could be doing something else, how would this be useful to you at the end?”

Build an ability to make the complex simple. Achieve that level of clarity required so each communication can be short and direct. This will take immense effort at times, but the salience of the final product will greatly increase the odds of your employees grasping and acting on the information.


Our forum bore fruit. These items are a buffet of sorts—tidbits arising not only from planned remarks from speakers and selected experts—but also from the conversations that naturally arose throughout the event, often between two previous strangers from different industries. How could they resonate in your organization? What impact could you make? What relationships and resources could you leverage? Where will you go to start the process?

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish in 12 hours.”

Documents

NDDCEL PDF Packet