Ethikos Editor’s Weekly Picks: How to Make Ethics Training Stick

By Mark Athitakis  for Associations Now
Ethics matters. On this, everybody agrees. The CEO will tell you that. The ethics seminar leader will tell you that. Even the staffer who was catching up on email while half-listening to that last ethics webinar everybody had to watch will tell you that.

Recognizing the importance of ethics is one thing. But getting people to actively engage with the issues that workplace ethics presents is another. Read more

By Ann Skeet for Market Watch
One multinational company headquartered in Silicon Valley used a culture assessment tool we’ve developed, with useful results. This company had a CEO and a lead independent director interested in signaling the workplace about the importance of ethics and a bias towards learning.  The discussion at the board meeting reviewing the results extended well beyond the original time allotted.  Read more

By Jonathan Aberman for The Washington Post
Subordinates are given autonomy to make rapid decisions in the moment, if necessary, to achieve the strategic goals of leadership. But it is not complete autonomy. Servant leaders require accountability against their expressed goals. This ensures that key values such as ethics and compliance with legal and other norms are honored and that the overall strategic objectives articulated by the leader are followed.  Read more

By Michael Cohn for Accounting Today
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants has released a new survey raising questions about how accountants and businesses around the world are dealing with ethical challenges prompted by various technology trends.

Ethics was considered a “very important” skill in the digital age by 77 percent of the respondents, with more than nine out of 10 giving ethics a top rating. An above-average proportion of respondents in the nonprofit and public sectors indicated they considered ethics as “very important” in the digital age. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents called for strong ethical leadership, while a 54 percent majority called for guidance on a new code of ethics for the digital age. Read more

By Mark A. Cohen for Forbes
I was recently invited by the ABA to address a group of General Counsel on “Lawyers as Guardians of Business Integrity and Conscience of the Company.” The topic was chosen because of a spate of high-profile scandals and regulatory imbroglios that resulted in no small part from the failure of GC’s to discharge the guardian/conscience role.

General counsel—and large corporate departments– are law’s petri dish. They are reconfiguring the boundaries and expanding the expectations of what it means to be an effective corporate lawyer. Read more