Over the weekend I saw Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth on Apple TV. To say it blew me away would be putting it mildly. David Sims, writing in The Atlantic, said, “Shot in stark black-and-white by the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and staged on abstract, minimalist sets designed by Stefan Dechant, the film feels like a foggy memory of a story told a hundred times…With The Tragedy of Macbeth, Coen is stripping away that scenery, zeroing in on the essential details of Shakespeare’s tale of how a hunger for power can curdle into madness and death.”
It felt like I was watching madness descend in a German expressionist movie. I have always thought of Macbeth as exactly that; a descent into madness due to the murderous machinations of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who were, in this treatment, played by Denzel Washington and Francis McDormand respectively. Both performances were Oscar worthy. Both actors, in their 60s, played the roles with a slightly different focus, which was succession. Not the great HBO show Succession but more what is their next succession. Over this week I am going to use Coen’s version of Macbeth to explore the questions of succession and what is next in compliance. Today, I want to take up the topic of transformation of your compliance program focusing on the ‘You’ in compliance as in the user.
In a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, entitled “The “New You” Business: How to compete on personal transformations”, authors Lance A. Bettencourt, B. Joseph Pine II, James H. Gilmore, and David W. Norton posited that when companies “do promote what they sell in relation to consumers’ aspirations, they rarely design solutions that allow people to realize them. Instead, individuals must cobble together what they think they need to achieve their goals—for example, a trainer, a particular diet, and a support network to lose weight. Enterprises should recognize the economic opportunity offered by a transformation business, in which consumers come to them with a desire to improve some fundamental aspect of their lives.” It struck me that many compliance programs suffer from the same fate; that is, they do not focus on what the employee really needs. This also sounds very much like a Design Thinking approach for compliance which I wholeheartedly embrace. (Check out my podcast, Design Thinking in Compliancewith co-host Carsten Tams for a sampling.)
The first thing a compliance function needs to do is to have a solutions mindset. From there move to providing compliance transformations which help the business use the corporate compliance program to generate positive outcomes that your employees, whether business development folks or others, need to succeed. Compliance services will then be viewed in another light, as a way to help employees achieve both their and the company’s desired results. Employees have a role in this process and through engagement between the compliance function and employees in the design process, your compliance function will have more back-end engagement after the design process is implemented.
The authors have a three-step process which I have adapted for the compliance professional and corporate compliance function. The first is defining a successful transformation. The second is to ascertain the jobs to be accomplished and third, to define your success as the design and implementation proceed.
Defining a successful transformation means that you must understand what your employees are trying to achieve. The authors further break this done into four categories. A Functional job is one which represents a goal an employee is trying to accomplish or a problem they are trying to solve. Functional jobs tend to center on specific tasks leading to specific solutions. Emotional jobs address the feelings desire in the employment setting. It can be empowerment or simply being appreciated for a job well done. Social jobs concern how employees desire to be perceived or relate to others, such as with encouragement or empathy. Finally, there are Aspirational jobs, which the authors believe “sit at the highest level of what motivates people. They involve becoming who an individual wants to be: living life to the fullest, financially secure, successful careerwise, and so on.” The conclusion should be that there are several methods a corporate compliance function can use to understand employees’ jobs, including interviews, observation, and ethnography. The authors also caution, “Data alone won’t uncover what motivates people, what goals they have, or what problems they want resolved.”
Next, a compliance function must define success along the way. Here your compliance team “must spend time interacting with [employees] to understand what success looks like at every point along the transformation journey. You should consider what new understandings, decisions, and tasks are required for an individual to prepare, make progress, and sustain the desired compliance results. Here the authors suggest asking such questions as: “What would you like to see happen quickly? What problems or inconsistencies would you like to avoid? What does success look like?” By asking these questions you not only have employees engaged but you, as the compliance professional, garner a better understanding of the outcomes the business folks are trying to achieve. This in turn will facilitate your design. It could be something as simple as where and how employees can submit confidential issues to a corporate compliance function. It could be as involved in how to keep employees informed about the progress anytime they engage in “speak up.”
Finally, the compliance function must identify the barriers involved, “why they may stand in the way and figuring out how to assist in overcoming them.” These barriers exist in three primary domains which include resources, such as offerings, time, budget; employee readiness, focusing on skills, motivation, clarity; and the context of both when and where things are done. Here a corporate compliance function can and should consult their internal experts, “to understand what hinders success” and external specialists, who have studied particular challenges. These resources can also help identify deficiencies in the goods, services, and compliance experiences.
The bottom line is that compliance transformations are not produced solely by a corporate compliance function, “they are achieved in partnership with the person being transformed.” This means compliance must determine what expectations, know-how, and motivation employees need at every stage of their employment cycle and experience. The answers translate into solutions designed to guide the journey, equip employees thoroughly for their role in a transformation, and strengthen their resolve to persist in doing business ethically in the face of difficulty and challenge.