Compliance & Ethics Professional - Society of Corporate ...

Compliance & Ethics Professional March/April 2012an online forum for their assignments andworked in three- or four-person study teamsto complete them. A portion of each call wasreserved for questions and answers. The onlineforum allowed managers to share ideas andask questions of their “pod mates.” An onlineassessment tool identified strengths and weaknesses.A website provided convenient access toresource and reference materials. The facilitatormonitored and contributed to the forum. Thestudy schedule was flexible, with the exceptionof the four calls.Finally, each participantwas required todevelop his or her ownpersonal learning planwith a set of learningobjectives. The scalabledesign allowed newclasses to start weekly,if needed.The managementtraining describedabove was successfulbecause it was interactive,collaborative, andtransformative. Thecourse had a leader,and the managerscould learn from each other. The managerscontrolled the learning pace. I’m not sayingthat all ethics and compliance courses shouldbe as elaborate as this one. We’d be run out oftown by senior management. I’m simply usingthis example to highlight the underlying attributesof the design.Let’s go back to the first four of Cialdini’sinfluencers: reciprocity, being like others,meeting the social norms of the group, andcommitment and consistency. I think you cansee how they meld together with the attributesof the successful management class. Thisapproach can influence values, behaviors, andthe all-important intuition.“The trust of managementis generally low, butemployees trust theirfirst-line manager themost. Why is this findingimportant? Because ittells us that if you want tochange things, first-linemanagers must beinvolved, and they need tohave a major role.”There is one more piece to this puzzle, andthen I’ll pull it all together. T.J. and SandarLarkin published some groundbreakingfindings in their 1994 book CommunicatingChange: How to Win Employee Support for NewBusiness Directions. 4 The authors found thatfirst-line managers are the most trusted membersof leadership. The trust of managementis generally low, but employees trust theirfirst-line manager the most. Why is this findingimportant? Because it tells us that if youwant to change things,first-line managersmust be involved, andthey need to have amajor role. This findingcan be applied toethics and compliancetraining.Managers can provideleadership withthe deployment oftraining activities. Toolssuch as the Internet,company Intranets,and streaming videoservers are usefulfor delivering trainingmaterials into thehands of first-line managers, who need to havean active role. The training must include interactiveactivities that require participants to talkand solve problems with each other. At the endof an exercise, a manager-led discussion aboutthe results helps crystallize the learning. If themanager’s only role is to get everyone into theroom and push the start button for participantsto sit and listen, then you are back to traditionalweb-based information transfer.To have effective ethics and compliancelearning experiences, we need to embrace anew model and approach. Gone are the dayswhere a single employee is interacting withhis/her computer. This includes apps on our66 www.corporatecompliance.org +1 952 933 4977 or 888 277 4977