An Event That Changed the World and Fostering Compliance Leadership – Part II

Yesterday, I used the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and its continuing legacy even up until today to introduce a two-part series about ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’. The assassination and some of its legacies were detailed in an article in the March 22 edition of the Financial Times (FT) in a piece by Simon Kuper entitled, ‘The crossroads of history”. In this article, Kuper wrote about his return to modern day Sarajevo “to try and understand his act in its local context – the context both of 1914 and 2104.” I think that Kuper did come to some understanding through his reporting, which I found to be first rate.

Yesterday I reviewed the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article entitled “Blue Ocean Leadership”, which I found to be one of the most interesting and perhaps even game-changing discussions on how to be a more effective leader that I have ever read or heard about. In Part I I wrote about what ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’ is and how it differs from conventional leadership. Today, I will review the strategies of how to execute this type of leadership and explore its implications for the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) or compliance practitioner.

I was extraordinarily gratified to see that the authors believe that something akin to the Fair Process Doctrine should be used to address over-coming resistance to changing over to ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’. The Fair Process Doctrine recognizes that there are fair procedures, not arbitrary ones, in a process involving rights. People are more willing to accept negative, unfavorable, and non-preferred outcomes when they are arrived at by processes and procedures that are perceived as fair by employees. This means that that employees will commit to a manager’s decision—even one they disagree with—if they believe that the process the manager used to make the decision was fair.

 The authors write “the gift that fair process confers is trust and, hence, voluntary cooperation, a quality vital to the leader-follower relationship. Anyone who has ever worked in an organization understands how important trust is. If you trust the process and the people you work for, you’re willing to go the extra mile and give your best. If you don’t trust them, you’ll stick to the letter of the law that binds your contract with the organization and devote your energy to protecting your position and fighting over turf rather than to winning customers and creating value. Not only will your abilities be wasted, but they will often work against your organization’s performance.”

 The authors have a somewhat different formulation for fair process when they say that it includes “engagement, explanation and expectation clarity.” Further, the authors say “the leadership development context, the application of fair process achieves buy-in and ownership of the to-be Leadership Profiles and builds trust, preparing the ground for implementation.” The authors suggest four steps for implementing ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’.

Step 1 – Respected senior managers should spearhead the effort. Nothing speaks to company employees more than who is leading an initiative. The authors state, “strongly signals the importance of the initiative, which makes people at all levels feel respected and gives senior managers a visceral sense of what actions are needed to create a step change in leadership performance.”

Step 2 – Engaging the company’s rank and file in defining what leaders should do. This is the engagement prong of the fair process doctrine. If there is engagement, employees will “feel more deeply engaged with their leaders, because they have greater ownership of what their leaders are doing.”

Step 3 – Giving employees a say in the final decision. This allows a vertical slice of the organization, from the top to bottom to have a say in what the leadership profiles will be going forward. This comes though give and take and if senior management does not accept a proffered leadership profile, it must be prepared to defend its decision, through a “clear, sound explanation of their decision.”

Step 4 – Ease in assessment of whether expectations are being met and in monitoring progress. The authors suggest no less than monthly feedback “between leaders and their direct reports help the organization check whether it’s making headway.” The authors write that such a timeframe, will “keep leaders honest, motivate them to continue with change, and build confidence in both the process and the sincerity of the leaders. By collecting feedback from those meetings, top management can assess how rapidly leaders are making the shift from their as-is to their to-be Leadership Profiles, which becomes a key input in annual performance evaluations.”

There are many tangible benefits that the authors article discuss and those discussions can lead directly to the elimination of actions that senior management invest their time in. Even if some actions and activities cannot be entirely eliminated, they can be reduced. Conversely, these types of discussions can show senior management what acts and activities should be raised above their current level. Finally, this type of leadership protocol can show leaders the types of activities they should be engaging in that they are not currently undertaking.

For the compliance practitioner I think there are several important lessons and implications, which can be drawn from this article. Rather than start with the CCO, I want to take the opposite approach and begin with the compliance practitioner who is on the frontline. The clearest lesson from this scholarship is to “serve your customers, not the boss.” This means should try to eliminate your queries up the chain and try to handle direct issues yourself and reduce seeking approval for decisions. Frontline compliance practitioners need to raise more relevant compliance training and information to the business units or geographic areas they support. Finally, the frontline compliance practitioners should celebrate compliance successes locally.

For the mid-level compliance manager, they strive for ‘more coaching and less control’ from senior management. This means elimination of frequent requests for detailed progress reports on initiatives and programs. Further, there should be a reduction of requirements and review of justifications for decisions from the frontline compliance practitioners. Mid-level compliance practitioners should strive to not only understand but also explain compliance strategy clearly and empower frontline compliance practitioners to stretch themselves through more effective coaching. Finally, mid-level compliance managers should work to set performance goals together, share best practices across teams, business units and geographic regions and align rewards with performance.

The key for senior level compliance practitioners is to move from the day-to-day work to the bigger picture of compliance. As much as possible, senior compliance managers need to stop operational problem solving and putting out fires. If senior compliance managers cannot fully eliminate such actions, they should try and reduce the number of meetings dealing with operations improvement but also try and reduce the monitoring and coordination of middle management. Issues that senior compliance managers should try and raise up in activities awareness include dealing with poor performance, coaching and motivating their direct reports, creating a compelling strategy and then clearly communicating that strategy. Finally, senior compliance managers should develop a compliance agenda for the future (think Stephen Martin’s 1-3-5 year strategy) and advance a process for implementation of continual assessment and improvement of that strategy.

The authors write, “We never cease to be amazed by the talent and energy we see in the organizations we study. Sadly, we are equally amazed by how much of it is squandered by poor leadership. Blue ocean leadership can help put an end to that.” They put forward “a concrete, visual framework in which they can surface and discuss the improvements leaders need to make. The fairness of the process makes the implementation and monitoring of those changes far easier than in traditional top-down approaches. Moreover, blue ocean leadership achieves a transformation with less time and effort, because leaders are not trying to alter who they are and break the habits of a lifetime. They are simply changing the tasks they carry out. Better yet, one of the strengths of blue ocean leadership is its scalability. You don’t have to wait for your company’s top leadership to launch this process. Whatever management level you belong to, you can awaken the sleeping potential of your people by taking them through the four steps.”

I found their article to be quite compelling. I hope that you will consider some or all of these suggestions as a way to set up you and your compliance team to become Blue Ocean Leaders and un-tap the potential of your entire compliance team.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2014

An Event That Changed the World and Fostering Compliance Leadership – Part I

This coming Saturday, June 28th, is the 100^th anniversary of most probably the single most momentous event of the 20^th century; the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, then located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I view it as the singular event of the prior century because it led directly to the following events: the First World War, the Second World War, the Russian Revolution, the fall of the Hapsburg, Romanov and Prussian monarchies, the Cold War and a host of other events. One can point to 1963 in Dallas and 9/11 as direct descendants of the actions of the Sarajevo assassins.

One of the best articles I have ever read on the assassination was in the March 22^nd edition of the Financial Times (FT) in a piece by Simon Kuper, entitled ‘The crossroads of history”. Kuper returned to modern day Sarajevo “to try and understand his act in its local context – the context both of 1914 and 2104.” I think that Kuper did come to some understanding through his reporting, which I found to be first rate. The attack on the Archduke itself came about through a plethora of mis-steps, foolish decisions and idiotic mistakes that rival any modern day industrial catastrophe. Kuper quoted the author Rebecca West for the following, “Nobody worked to ensure the murder on either side as the people who were murdered.” As this assassination started Europe down a road that led to well over 20 million deaths, it is an appropriate start to many more posts I will have during the centenary of 1914.

Just as Gavrilo Princip changed the course of history, I recently read an article in the May edition of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) which I think could significantly modify how you, as a Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) or compliance practitioner, will think about getting employees to “apply their talent and energy to move organizations forward” in compliance and ethics. The article is entitled “Blue Ocean Leadership”. In this two-part series I will explain the authors view of the problem that “According to Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report, 50% of employees merely put their time in, while the remaining 20% act out their discontent in counterproductive ways, negatively influencing their coworkers, missing days on the job, and driving customers away through poor service. Gallup estimates that the 20% group alone costs the U.S. economy around half a trillion dollars each year.” The authors believe that “poor leadership is a key cause” of this problem. The authors posit that leadership is a “service that people in an organization “buy” or “don’t buy” and when employees come to value you as a leader, they “in effect buy your leadership.”

Today I will focus on how ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’ differs from conventional leadership and tomorrow I will review strategies of how to execute this type of leadership and explore its implications for the CCO or compliance practitioner.

Key Differences from Conventional Leadership Approaches

The authors point to three key differences between ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’ and traditional leadership approaches.

The first key difference is that ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’ “focuses on what acts and activities leaders need to undertake to boost their teams’ motivation and business results, not on who leaders need to be. This difference in emphasis is important. It is markedly easier to change people’s acts and activities than their values, qualities, and behavioral traits. Of course, altering a leader’s activities is not a complete solution, and having the right values, qualities, and behavioral traits matters. But activities are something that any individual can change, given the right feedback and guidance.”

The second under ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’ is to “connect closely to market realities”. This is accomplished by having “the people who face market realities are asked for their direct input on how their leaders hold them back and what those leaders could do to help them best serve customers and other key stakeholders. And when people are engaged in defining the leadership practices that will enable them to thrive, and those practices are connected to the market realities against which they need to perform, they’re highly motivated to create the best possible profile for leaders and to make the new solutions work.” This allows not only employee buy-in both also quicker and more efficient engagement of the implementation of a leaders program.

The third key difference is that ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’ distributes leadership across all levels of management. The authors quoted one senior executive who said, “The truth is that we, the top management, are not in the field to fully appreciate the middle and frontline actions. We need effective leaders at every level to maximize corporate performance.” However ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’ is more robustly “designed to be applied across the three distinct management levels: top, middle, and frontline. It calls for profiles for leaders that are tailored to the very different tasks, degrees of power, and environments you find at each level. Extending leadership capabilities deep into the front line unleashes the latent talent and drive of a critical mass of employees, and creating strong distributed leadership significantly enhances performance across the organization.”

The Four Steps of Blue Ocean Leadership

Most importantly the authors believe that you have to see your leadership for what it is and not what you wish it to be. If you do not have a “common understanding of where leadership stands and is falling short, a forceful case for change cannot be made.” The authors created a template that they called “Leadership Canvases” which are visual representations to show what leaders actually do, rather than what they think they do. The authors’ research showed that 20% to 40% of all actions taken by managers are of little value to the organization. This led to the “biggest “aha” for the subteams was that senior managers appeared to have scarcely any time to do the real job of top management—thinking, probing, identifying opportunities on the horizon, and gearing up the organization to capitalize on them.”

Based upon this initial finding, the authors began to explore alternative leadership profiles. Here you are required “to think beyond the bounds of the company and focus on effective leadership acts they’ve observed outside the organization, in particular those that could have a strong impact if adopted by internal leaders at their level. Here fresh ideas emerge about what leaders could be doing but aren’t. This is not, however, about benchmarking against corporate icons; employees’ personal experiences are more likely to produce insights. Most of us have come across people in our lives who have had a disproportionately positive influence on us. It might be a sports coach, a schoolteacher, a scoutmaster, a grandparent, or a former boss. Whoever those role models are, it’s important to get interviewees to detail which acts and activities they believe would add real value for them if undertaken by their current leaders.”

The next step begins to take what I call some real corporate courage. It requires that middle and frontline managers critique what senior management has come up with in step 2, developing alternative leadership profiles. Some of the more interesting changes were ‘Cut through the Crap’ in which “frontline leaders did not defer the vast majority of customer queries to middle management and spent less time jumping through procedural hoops. Their time was directed to training frontline personnel to deliver on company promises on the spot” and to resolve problems. Another was ‘Liberate, Coach and Empower’ where leaders “time and attention shifted from controlling to supporting employees.” Finally, there was ‘Delegate and Chart the Company’s Future’ where the front and middle line managers had more responsibility so “senior managers would be freed up to devote a significant portion of their time to thinking about the big picture—the changes in the industry and their implications for strategy and the organization. They would spend less time putting out fires.”

‘Blue Ocean Leadership’ challenges companies to allow its employees to “think about which acts and activities leaders should do less of because they hold people back, and which activities they should do more of because they inspire people to give their all.” Just as you begin to think through the changes wrought by one action in a small town, very long ago, which changed the 20^th Century forever, you may wish to use these concepts to think about how your leadership can be made more effective.

In tomorrow’s post I will look at how the authors believe you can execute a ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’ change in your company.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2014