By Roy Snell
roy.snell@corporatecompliance.org
Brett Anne posted that she feels moms are the original compliance officers. I thought it was brilliant. I asked her for permission to expand on her concept.
My mother was an interesting individual. She led by example, particularly when it came to rejecting prejudice and bigotry. She and my father never uttered a bigoted word in front of me. I once called a big kid “pumpkin” and my mother unloaded on me verbally. It was significant to me because she never got mad and rarely disciplined. I literally didn’t know how to be bigoted. I was so ill-informed that I was in fact… naive. My third year in college I was told by someone that my roommate from the previous year was Jewish. I told him I didn’t know that my roommate was Jewish. He said, “Really! You didn’t know that Marc Greenstein was Jewish?”
I was oblivious to the fact that people thought less or more of someone based on religion, race, sexual orientation, etc. Mom was an actress. She was a regular at the Old Log Theater in Excelsior Minnesota. Such theaters had people who would come and go from out of state. Some of them would stay at our house for weeks at a time. Nick Nolte stayed with us for a while. Some of the regular actors and visiting actors had lifestyles that were not common or accepted back then. My mother welcomed them into our house and treated them all the same. So I treated everyone the same. It was much later in life that I realized I was supposed to categorize and reject certain people. By then it was too late. I could not do it if I wanted to. It was burned into my DNA. I laugh at my ignorance of bigotry now. It is odd to be proud of ignorance.
Could my mother have been a compliance and ethics officer… probably not. But I will tell you this, being raise by her remains to this day my best example of leading by example. She was so effective at setting tone at the top while I lived with her that I never knew there was another way to act. These are tremendous skills for a compliance and ethics officer. Happy Mother’s Day Marjorie Beth Snell, my first Compliance and Ethics Officer.
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In orientation or dept. specific training I always use the analogy of the home to emphasize compliance concepts. It resonates with the listeners and make perfect sense. For example, I talk about reporting and fear of retaliation using the scenario of a child who knows the kitchen is on fire but who’s afraid to tell the parent for fear of retaliation, or the child who knows that the a sibling sneaks out but who doesn’t say anything.
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