Let’s assume we let these professionals do their jobs provided they all signed certificates verifying they had reviewed the materials listed below and completed a few multiple-choice questions to prove they knew the basics. We’d give:
• Surgeons some documents and diagrams regarding surgical procedures and then assign them their first operation.
• Airline pilots a list of procedures and then allow them to go fly planes.
• Nuclear power plant operators a list of protocols and then authorize them to run their plants.
• Members of our military field manuals and then send them straight into battle.
We’d never let that happen. We know there’s a life and death distinction between delivering information and making sure it’s understood, remembered and applied—not occasionally but as a matter of daily practice.
What follows could be about Congress, a city police force, a football franchise or any of the professions listed above.
I recently met with executives of a nationally well-known organization. Their established leaders and emerging talent are constantly in the public eye—all aspects of their jobs are reported, recorded, analyzed and constantly second-guessed. They can be heroes one day and goats the next.
Do the right thing at just the right moment and a relatively unknown individual can rise from obscurity to seeming immortality. Blow a routine assignment at the wrong instant and a career lauded for excellence will be linked forever to disaster.
Because their actions are so visible, what members do in public in terms of their “personal conduct”—in front of others in the “real world” and now online—can generate enormous publicity including outrage, embarrassment and brand damage directed at them and their organizations. This organization, like others in its line of business, has had recent events where its prominent members have engaged in shocking, outrageous conduct causing both individual and institutional harm.
I asked those with whom I met how key contributors learned about their legal, behavioral and ethical responsibilities, whose breach could cause so much damage. They told me that individuals complete an annual or biannual online course.
But they noted that getting recipients to understand key lessons in the context of so many other messages they receive is their big challenge. Yet this same organization constantly trains and evaluates its members selecting and retaining those with the best potential and demonstrated performance. If members can’t learn and apply key lessons and play by the rules, they simply can’t stay.
As I see it, their problem, and that of many other organizations, is that individuals are getting knowledge but not “getting” that it’s important. Making sure the significance of information is clearly understood and not just delivered is a key employer responsibility.
In this case, the organization is managing information distribution—actually the basic transmission of data—but not managing its importance and monitoring how it’s applied. I often hear organizations talk about robust learning management systems but rarely about robust behavior management in the spheres of ethics and civil behavior.
Ask this question: “Is our organization addressing ethics and civility with anything like the sort of emphasis as other important issues, which can likewise affect performance and cause harm?”
If the answer is no, then don’t be surprised if your leaders and others make the headlines, though not the kind your organization will look forward to reading.
Stephen Paskoff is president and CEO of Atlanta-based ELI Inc., a provider of ethics and compliance learning solutions. He can be contacted at info@eliinc.com.
