As a Prison Consultant, I believe it’s necessary to preserve the integrity of your company and your people for long-term success by discussing consequences when employees fail to adhere to compliance and ethics.
Ethics is fundamental to the securities laws, and I believe ethical, compliance and consequence culture objectives should be central to any effective regulatory compliance program.
Organizations are making meaningful changes to embrace consequences into the this trend and implement leading practices to make their regulatory compliance and risk management programs more effective.
Large companies have clearly drafted ethics and compliance policies that employees are expected to understand and follow. The smaller the company, the less likely there will be a clearly written ethics policy. But large or small, the challenge for all companies is communication about what is acceptable and unacceptable. Creating an ethics policy and training it effectively are keys to exposing rationalization and improving ethical behavior within an organization but discussing consequences is equally important.
On what kind of foundation is your business built? No matter how strong the physical building and reputation of the corporation, any company is still vulnerable to damage if it’s not built on the cornerstones of ethics, integrity, honesty and accountability. The costs of unethical behavior to your business can be staggering and embarrassing… but they can also be prevented by discussing consequences.
Whether your organization has dealt with ethical dilemmas in the past—or you simply want to prevent them in the future— I can help. I’m passionate about sharing through unique insights and solutions that can make a world of difference in strengthening your corporation and the people in it.
The most reputable companies have faced embarrassment due to overvaluing liquid fund assets, failure to disclose bonuses, misleading investors, fraud, insider trading, misappropriation of funds bribery schemes and other SEC violations. How powerful do you think it would make your risk management and media relations department feel if it were to happen to your company? The answer can be “pretty good” when they can make a statement to the media i.e.; “While we cannot stop an employee from engaging in unethical behavior, we have taken the initiative to educate our employees, not only on compliance and ethics but the consequences for failing to adhere to them.”
While compliance and ethics officers play a key role in supporting effective ERM, risk managers in areas such as investment risk, market risk, credit risk, operational risk, funding risk and liquidity risk also play an important role. When it comes to implementing consequences, the board, senior management, other risk and control functions, the business units and internal audit must play a critical role in ERM. They can and should not sit back and willingly leave out training from an experienced prison consultant. My ethics training would entail consequences, after all it’s, from someone who has failed, paid their debt and can deliver an effective message to employees so that they never put themselves or their companies in the media due to greed. One needs only reflect on the financial crisis to understand how the aggregation and inter-relationship of risks across various risk categories and market participants created the perfect storm.
As a prison coach and public speaker, I can tactfully deliver a message based on actual consequences that really make a difference. My real-life experience with choices and consequences gives me the unique ability to talk about ethics beyond legal and compliance issues. I delve deeper to explore the underlying human factors and focuses on how to help people who may have misguided ambitions make the right choices in their places of employment and personal lives.