Most of what is written about ethics, ethical leadership and ethical behaviour focuses on what needs to be done not HOW it can be achieved. The focus is often on compliance, an essential but insufficient aspect of ethical behaviour. Compliance is based on rules and processes, which become a box ticking exercise and there are ways to circumvent the rules if intent is there. Embedding ethical behaviour confers a commercial advantage with the certainty that any investment cost will be exponentially less than the fines and lost market share that many organisations are paying resulting from unethical behaviour.
We work with your organisation to gain the benefits for the long term by building enduring cultures based on appropriate ethical behaviour.
This change is driven from the top throughout the whole organisation through all levels of management and supervision. We call this an “Ethics Champions Programme” with everyone in the organisation becoming a champion of this change.
Although we always customise our approach to a your specific needs and context, a typical process look like this:
- Identify and embed the behaviours that will lead to an ethically performing culture
- Align the team around those behaviours with a common understanding and vocabulary to describe and model the behaviours
- Reinforce why running an ethical business makes commercial sense
- Lead the SLT to be able to develop the same behaviours in others
- Take account of the geographic and culturally dispersed nature of the organisation and competing time pressures
The programme starts with an interview / culture survey diagnostic to ensure we have an independent and broad view of the organisation to feed into the programme design and implementation. For the Senior Leadership programme we recommend 4 x 1 day MasterClasses. These MasterClasses will be complemented by on-line ALIVE© Prep and post MasterClass ALIVE© Calls to embed, extend and contextualise learning and actions, It may also include LEIPA® 360 degree performance accelerator providing a report that identifies development areas of behaviours and leadership styles that can positively impact performance. We also include ongoing evaluation of the programme.
Once the programme is underway, and with input from the SLT the programme is rolled out through the various management levels, progressively involving in-house resource to transfer capability in a cost effective way.