Compliance Apologists: Being Liked vs. Being Respected

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By Roy Snell
roy.snell@corporatecompliance.org

I see a lot of compliance articles and presentations that are essentially, “How to get people to like compliance.” Some compliance folks don’t want to look like cops. They want people to like compliance training. Instead of telling people they should be grateful that we found a problem early and they won’t need to be fired, pay a fine, or go to jail, some compliance folks apologize for auditing, investigating, and enforcing the rules. We don’t make up the rules. Why are we apologizing for rules society insisted be put into place? The very people some of us are apologizing to are the ones who elected the people who created the rules. The very people some of us are apologizing to asked for regulations against bribery, setting up bogus bank accounts, and letting pedophiles run around for 10 years. I am sorry; I don’t get it. Why are we apologizing?

You can’t have it both ways. You can either stop the problem and not be liked or you can back off, have big problems, and not be liked. When I was a compliance officer, I was not liked by everyone, particularly the people whose integrity was a little suspect. But, I was respected by people with integrity. I am now a CEO. I am occasionally not liked because of decisions I make or policies I have. What I am shooting for is being respected in the long run. By the way, if you are respected you will be, by definition, liked. I just don’t think you can get there from here, with any job, if you are constantly apologizing for doing your job.

I am not suggesting being mean. I am suggesting that you do your job and don’t succumb to the compliance apologists who are focused on being liked in the short run. Be mature. Be collaborative. Be a good motivator. Inspire people. “Stay calm and carry on” doesn’t mean whip out a board game and buy doughnuts for everyone every time there is resistance. Look at the people who are good managers. Managers you respect occasionally do things people don’t like. Look at parents who you think are doing a great job raising their children. They may irritate their children on occasion, but they will have their children’s respect in the long run. Our jobs are very similar. Apologizing is not how it works. Apologizing is not how any of this works.

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9 COMMENTS

  1. Great point Roy! As I was reading this, I was immediately pulled back to a discussion I was having yesterday with a fellow IG.

    I know this dilemma. I think you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar generally in life. That applies to the interview room when seeking an admission – and it applies in our dealings with agency management as well (who we often depend on for budget, staffing levels, etc.)

    It’s this agency relationship that’s difficult. Walking the line between respecting them and their role and maintaining appropriate IG independence is tough. Also, walking the line between carrying out our transparency-focused mission and their desire (as elected/appointed officials) to keep the dirty business private, is another necessary – but slippery – slope.

    Your article make a key point:

    “You can’t have it both ways. You can either stop the problem and not be liked or you can back off, have big problems, and not be liked.”

    In a municipal environment, I think a colleague, the former IG for Palm Beach County, worked this well when she considered the citizens, not the elected/appointed officials, to be her biggest proponent and her primary customer. Exposing corruption and mismanagement to the citizens will secure the IG’s position and office far more effectively than focusing on a favorable relationship with the mayor or council (although doing both is ideal if possible).

    These are an IGs toughest challenges – – as well as our compliance officer peers.

    • I totally agree. Lets be as civil and nice as we can be… but lets not apologize for helping prevent the company from becoming the next one on the front page of the news with huge fines, people going to jail, PR disasters, etc. And by the way, IG’s and compliance professionals are one in the same from my perspective. I have spoken at your conferences and what you all do (albeit in a different setting) is almost exactly what everyone else in SCCE is doing. As you have said, we could not be closer colleagues and can work together to learn from each other.

  2. I think this happens because we all have the toolkit to apologize and do fun things to be liked—but we often don’t have the toolkit to communicate our business value.

    So, when we run into interference, we use the tools we know.

    That is, we all know how to buy doughnuts and play board games. It’s more complicated to know how to measure results and make business cases and show ROI.

    None of that stuff is particularly hard, but it’s business stuff, and you have to know
    how to do it—which is a weak spot for a lot of compliance folks, because it isn’t our background. We spend a lot of time discussing the law and the tools, and far less on the business-side, financial stuff that lets us translate our hard work into business value.

    And it’s very reasonable for business leaders to push back on a compliance initiative if it’s unclear how it will actually result in compliance, or how it’s the most efficient way to achieve that compliance result.

    This is the type of thing they ask of every other corporate team. When they ask this of marketing, for example, the marketing team doesn’t apologize or worry that leadership doesn’t believe in marketing—they go figure out how to make the business case for what they’re doing.

    The right response to pushback is not apology, but focusing on results and value and communicating that the language of the businesspeople we serve.

    (Also, plug: this is the topic of our session at this year’s Compliance and Ethics Institute! We’ll be demonstrating the basic calculations to make a business case and show ROI. We’re on Tuesday—session title is “How to Prove Your Program Works.”)

    • This is great. That will be a good session. I think ROI is tough. My problem is that HR, Legal, Risk, Audit, and many other departments don’t have to or do spend a lot of time justifying their existence from an ROI standpoint. It would be as difficult if not impossible for them to do the math too. There is just no data on things like costly events that didn’t happen because unlike Exquifax, we prevented the problem from happening with a compliance program. Maybe we are expected to calculate ROI because our department is new. I posted something the other day that said… “Compliance is considered a cost center by some leaders. Other leaders consider non-compliance a cost center.” I am not sure we should be too eager to be pulled into the ROI justification argument. Just because they want it doesn’t mean it is possible. I would focus the conversation on… “What is the alternative, become Enron, Penn State, Wells Fargo, Equifax. etc.? Do we really have a choice? Why debate the ROI question if we have no choice or data? While we are debating the ROI question some problem down the hall is going undiscovered. The ROI question is incalculable and a distraction to an effective compliance officer.” All that said… lets do the best we can with these questions but we can’t let it slow us down or deter us from doing our job.

      • So, no spoilers for the session, but that’s exactly what we’re tackling.

        The data you need to show ROI comes from the monitoring part of your program, and then you’re just using the sort of math that businesses do all the time.

        You monitor a risky process, you implement a compliance initiative, and you monitor again. You translate the reduction in error to dollars.

        Or you find out it didn’t work, and you know you need to try something else.

        We’ll be walking through an example and then looking to workshop this live with people in the audience.

        (Obviously, there’s a little more to it than that, but I actually want people to attend the conference and not just read this.)

        Please attend! Would be nice to meet in person.

  3. After reading the comments posted after I wrote this article I had another thought….

    I don’t recall seeing other departments apologizing for doing their work. Legal, audit, HR, quality, customer service… are they apologizing? I don’t think so. Just because people act like they want an apology from us… it doesn’t mean they should get one. They may want something from you and if you give it to them they may not respect you. People are strange that way. Its like your kids, they test you, and they may not be impressed if you “fall for it.” You train people to treat you a certain way. If you apologize they are going to treat you one way. They will treat you a different way if you help them understand that because of you they will not become the next John Stumpf, Rick Pitino or whomever the guy from Equifax was that just “retired.” Personally I am done apologizing for solving the problems the very people looking for an apology are begging to be solved every night on the national news. It just makes no sense. There are entire countries whose people are suffering from corruption much worse than we have. We are playing a role to make our country better. I am not going to apologize for any of this. I’ll tell you who should be apologizing to people… Wells Fargo, Equifax, Penn State, and many others because they had ineffective compliance programs and many people were hurt because of it.

  4. Thanks Roy. I read this a couple of times and came out with a different perspective each time, wondering if I am guilty or the very thing you highlight. I do in fact buy donuts, tell funny jokes, volunteer for everything and anything to help imbed the Compliance and Regulatory Team into the culture. Yet, not once have I ever apologized for enforcing a rule, finding a problem or holding my peers accountable. On the contrary, I do collaborate, I do participate and I do advise them on the solutions that will be most likely to keep us out of jail. I believe there is value to being a partner and being transparent about the struggles the healthcare industry faces. There is value to celebrating the finds, the action items and the improvements that occur as a result and if the occasional donut shows up in my hands to help remind everyone that doing the right thing is the right thing than so be it. In short, we can be good, fun and respected partners without being apologetic to create a culture of compliance across our organizations. If people remember me as the crazy lady with trivia about the False Claims Act in the Cafeteria and that makes them report a concern then I count that is a very unapologetic victory.

  5. Apologizing for doing the right thing seems counter-cultural to the mission. There is a way to support operations positively, demonstrating the value compliance, risk and governance play within the organization. This feels likes the equivalent of apologizing to a child for not allowing him to run in front of a moving vehicle.

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