[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everyone. The Business Ethics Leadership alliance has questions and we have answers. I'm your host, Bill Coffin. Welcome to another BELLA Asks episode of the Ethicast.
The Business Ethics Leadership alliance, or bela, is a global ethics and compliance community that provides exclusive access to helpful data, program benchmarking, roundtable events and a resource library with hundreds of policy guidance documents, member contributed program examples and more. But one of the most popular aspects of BELLA membership is our concierge service in which members can submit any question at all regarding ethics and compliance. And our internal experts will provide an answer and helpful resources with further information. And while we invite everyone watching and listening to join bella, we also know that there is no competition in compliance, which is why we're using this program to thematically respond to high level questions from the BELLA community for the benefit of ENC teams everywhere. And joining us once again to answer those questions is Bella chair Erica Salmon Byrne. Erica, it's good to see you again.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: It's good to see you, Bill. I'm delighted to be back.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: So our next question is a communications question and it reads, how do I create ethics and compliance themed executive slides for a leadership library?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Yeah, this is a really interesting question to me Bill, because this indicates two things.
One, this is a compliance officer or member of the compliance community who really gets the importance of tone setting. So is obviously looking for materials that will allow leaders of all levels across the organization to carry their water from for them, which is something that we talk to compliance teams about all the time.
And it also indicates to me that this is a person who is not in control of that library. So this is a library that is pre existing. Right. Perhaps this is something where the HR team or the comms team or a chief of staff or somebody else has created a library of materials for leaders and the ethics and compliance team is being invited to, to contribute materials to that library. But there's a whole bunch of other stuff that is available to them. Right, that's how I'm interpreting this particular question. And so there's, there's a couple things to keep in mind for that. One is you really want to, to keep in mind that your materials are going to be competing with other materials in the library. So how do you create something compelling that is also going to be easy for a person who is not an ethics and compliance professional to utilize in their day to day work. So the first step in this is always going to be understanding what the FORA or forums forum that these might potentially be used in look like. Are you creating materials for an organization that has a lot of small meetings, are you creating materials for an organization that has a lot of large meetings, are you being invited to put things in a library that people will be required to access or that people will be invited to access? Because those, those factors are going to play into the way you think about the length of your materials and the topic coverage.
One of the things that I always recommend that goes into an ENC library for leaders is something for them to do as pre work before they start delivering any of these messages. And that is something that we developed for the Bella community called an approachability self assessment.
So how, how open am I to people bringing me questions and concerns as a leader? We have a short little assessment we've built for managers to take so that they can then say to themselves, either yes, this is something that we can take forward, or this is something that I need to do some work on myself before people are going to really hear this message from me. And includes things like, what's your response to failure? Categorize the last five issues your team has brought you on a scale of one to, you know, on a scale of small problem to dumpster fire. If the last five problems have all been dumpster fires, chances are good that your people are scared of you. And so before you start to carry ethics and compliance messaging to them, you need to think about, how do I make myself feel like somebody that people would be comfortable asking questions? So that's a little bit of the pre work piece. Then it's about risk topics. What do I want leaders to be talking about? What do I want leaders to be bringing on my behalf? What kinds of materials are going to feel natural to a leader and how do I deliver things in that particular format? Maybe it's a bulleted list of things to cover. Maybe it's a cartoon, maybe it's a short video, maybe it's a four point PowerPoint slide. So those are some of the things to think about when you think about what goes in that library.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Eric, I really appreciated when you started answering this question. You took a step back and you had a little root cause analysis on why the question was being asked in general. And you do that a lot on Bella Asks, but I noticed it this time especially and it really enriches the answer. So, you know, thank you again for coming on the show, but also thank you for just the intentionality that you bring to the insights you're delivering to the, to the community.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: Oh, no, Bill, I appreciate that. I mean, look at the end of the day. A lot of the ethics and compliance issues that our community deals with are portable. Right.
They're kind of fundamental questions that can be asked no matter what industry you're in and no matter where you might be operating. And that was the whole idea behind Bella Asks in the first place, is let's take some of these thematic questions and answer them more broadly. But I think it's important for, for people who are listening in to understand that you have to customize each one of these things to your own organization, because if you don't take the time to do that customization, it's not going to work. And so, you know, anytime I can model that kind of customization for the, for the groups and the, and the, the entities that we're supporting through this particular channel, I'm going to take it. Because otherwise, you know, you're, you're wandering into the quagmire and you don't know which end is up.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: Absolutely. Could not agree more. Well, once again, thank you so much, and we'll see you again next time.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Well, thank you, Bill. And to all those Bella members out there listening, please keep the questions coming because I really enjoy coming back and unpacking these with my friend Bill. And, you know, the more questions we get, the more fun we have coming back to answer them.
[00:06:36] Speaker A: To learn more about Bella, please Visit@the sphere.com Bella to request guest access to the member resource hub and to speak with the Bella engagement director. And if you have a question that you would like answered on this program, contact the Bella Concierge service and we'll get to work on it for you. I'm Bill Coffin, and this has been another Bella Asks episode of the Ethicast. If this is your first time listening, we hope you've enjoyed the show. For more content like this every week, please subscribe here on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You can also get our free weekly
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[email protected] resources. Thanks so much for joining us. And until next time, remember, strong ethics is good business.
