Tag: Great Women in Compliance

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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: After Someone Speaks: Employee Voice, Trust and What Happens Next

In this episode of Great Women in Compliance, co-host Dr. Hemma R. Lomax sits down with Rebecca Taylor, HR leader, entrepreneur, community builder, and host of the HR Voices podcast, to talk about employee voice, trust, culture, leadership, and the future of employee relations.

Rebecca shares what more than a decade in HR has taught her about difficult workplace decisions, the signals hidden beneath complaints, and why what happens after someone speaks matters just as much as creating the space for them to speak in the first place.

Highlights include:

  • Why employees are the culture and voice is one of its most important signals.
  • Why difficult workplace situations often contain multiple truths at once.
  • How leaders can build trust by explaining the reasoning behind decisions.
  • Why complaints and hotline reports should be treated as useful data, not noise.
  • How HR and compliance professionals can influence leaders by meeting them where they are.
  • How AI can bring richer context to employee relations by connecting fragmented workplace data.

Hemma promised to share a link to Rebecca’s integrity anthem: Starálfur” by Sigur Rós, from the album Ágætis byrjun. Check it out here. Starálfur, or Ágætis byrjun—Sigur Rós official site here: https://sigurros.com/music/agaetis-byrjun/

About Rebecca Taylor

Rebecca Taylor is a people and workplace leader with more than a decade of experience across HR, employee relations, leadership, coaching, and workplace technology. She is the former co-founder and COO of SkillCycle, a coaching platform built for the AI era, and today leads community and content at AllVoices, an AI-native employee relations platform. She also hosts the HR Voices podcast, where she speaks with practitioners working through the realities of modern HR and employee relations.

Rebecca is passionate about employee voice, workplace culture, community, and helping organizations understand the human context behind the signals their people provide. A lifelong writer and former college DJ, she has built a career around listening closely, asking what sits beneath the surface, and connecting people and ideas across the workplace.

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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: Together, What We Can Do: Sharon Seivert on Ethics, Systems and the Six Powers

What if ethics and compliance weren’t something we bolted onto organizations but something built into how the organization actually works?

In this episode of Great Women in Compliance, Dr. Hemma R. Lomax talks with Sharon Seivert, Founder and CEO of Core Coaching & Consulting and creator of the SIX POWERS® framework, about organizational health, human agency, and building integrity from the inside out.

For Sharon, the work is deeply personal. She shares how the loss of her brother John in a workplace accident shaped her commitment to healthier systems and raises a question at the heart of the conversation: when something goes wrong, do we focus only on the individual event, or do we allow what happened to teach the system?

Sharon and Hemma explore what becomes possible when organizations are treated as living systems capable of learning, adapting, and recovering, and why ethics and compliance professionals should not have to do that work alone.

Highlights include:

  • Sharon’s personal connection to ethics, compliance, and workplace safety
  • The SIX POWERS® framework: Core, Vision, Mission, Interactions, Structure, and Synergy
  • Why purpose and principles can act as an organizational “tuning fork”
  • The difference between individual responsibility and systemic responsibility
  • Finding and using your own “hub of power”
  • The hidden costs of ethical compromise
  • Why near misses should teach the system, not simply disappear into a case file
  • Building organizations with enough “wobble” to adapt, recover, and evolve
  • Why, ultimately, together we can do hard things well

Further reading from A Thinking Game

Sharon Seivert: Powering the Future: A Six Powers Roadmap & Compass. Evolve Organizations. Activate Leaders. Ignite Purpose.

Available on Amazon

This conversation also helped inspire Hemma’s latest A Thinking Game article, “A Community of Many Splendid Torches,” which explores what becomes possible when individual acts of courage, care, and participation are understood as part of a larger human system.

A Thinking Game on LinkedIn

A Thinking Game on Substack

Bio

Sharon Seivert is the Founder and CEO of Core Coaching & Consulting, LLC, where she works at the intersection of leadership, systems thinking, and organizational health. A former CEO in healthcare and business consulting, Sharon brings decades of experience helping leaders, teams, and organizations navigate complex change.

She has written multiple books on her signature SIX POWERS® framework, a holistic approach designed to strengthen leadership and organizational health from the inside out. Her work brings together purpose, strategy, relationships, and systems thinking to help individuals and organizations become more integrated, resilient, and capable of lasting transformation.

Sharon is also a leadership coach, business consultant, and speaker, working with organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies and with a global community committed to healthier ways of living and leading.

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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: Setbacks, Second Acts, and A Return to Purpose

Sarah Hadden sits down with Cindy Hennessy for a candid, funny, and deeply human conversation about career loss, reinvention, and what can happen when the next chapter of your life isn’t the one you planned. Cindy talks openly about being laid off late in her career—and refusing to let her employer call it “retirement”—and the long “hallway” between that ending and the unexpected opportunity that eventually brought her full circle to mission-driven work at Make-A-Wish. Along the way, Sarah and Cindy talk about resilience, the luxury and importance of waiting for work that aligns with your values, the surprising gifts that can come from rejection, and the power of writing to help us make sense of difficult experiences. There’s also an emotional-support Pomeranian, a lifelong love affair with the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, and a reminder that sometimes joy, hope, and a willingness to laugh at yourself are pretty good tools for navigating whatever comes next.

Takeaways:

  • Losing a job can be deeply personal—especially when work has been an important part of your identity—and there’s no reason to sanitize the experience or pretend it didn’t hurt.
  • Cindy describes the uncertain period after a major life disruption as “the hallway”: one door has closed, the next hasn’t opened yet, and sometimes the only way forward is simply to live through the space in between.
  • A late-career transition can also create an opportunity to get much more intentional about what you want—including the freedom to say no to work that doesn’t align with your values.
  • Cindy’s path back to Make-A-Wish, where she had worked 25 years earlier, wasn’t something she carefully engineered. In fact, she initially wasn’t sure she wanted the job—a good reminder to stay open to possibilities that don’t look quite right at first.
  • Mission matters. After years of interesting but sometimes less personally aligned work, Cindy talks about the joy of using her experience to serve an organization whose purpose she deeply believes in.
  • Writing has been one of Cindy’s lifelong tools for processing difficult experiences. She shares her experience with the 100-Day Reckoning, a structured writing practice that helped her step outside a painful situation and find greater perspective, kindness, and understanding.
  • Reinvention doesn’t necessarily mean chasing another bigger title. Cindy is deliberately thinking about how to do meaningful work while also making more room for travel, friends, family, writing, Mahjong—and eventually a life that isn’t organized around a W-2.
  • And finally: Never give up on the Wienermobile. Cindy certainly hasn’t.
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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: Beyond the Balance Sheet: Ethics Lessons from Australia’s Accounting Scandals

For this #GWIC roundtable episode, Lisa Fine and Ellen Hunt spoke with two renowned experts, Francine McKenna and Ursula Schmidt, about what Ethics & Compliance professionals should learn from recent accounting firm scandals in Australia.

Listen in as our guests help us unravel:

  • why similar scandals keep happening,
  • how the incentives and pressure at play in these scandals are universal,
  • the important role that culture plays,
  • how auditors and others should live up to their professional standards, and
  • why we still ignore those that bring issues forward.

There are lessons in these scandals for every #Ethics and #Compliance professional on how to improve your culture and program. A huge thank you to Francine and Ursula for sharing their insights, expertise, and wisdom with us.

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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: Curiosity at the Complexity Café

Career journeys are rarely linear—and sometimes our most valuable lessons come from the unexpected turns.

In this episode of Great Women in Compliance, co-host Dr. Hemma Lomax sits down with Amybeth Garcia-Bokor to explore a career spanning public service, legal and compliance leadership, and an inspiring pivot from law to baking before returning to the profession with a renewed perspective. Together, they discuss how curiosity, resilience, and thoughtful leadership help compliance professionals navigate increasing complexity while building trust and enabling better decisions.

Key Takeaways:

  • Why judgment is one of the most important capabilities in modern compliance.
  • How an unconventional career path can strengthen leadership and perspective.
  • The evolution of compliance from enforcement to strategic business partnership.
  • Building cultures where curiosity, learning, and open dialogue thrive.
  • Leading confidently through ambiguity without sacrificing integrity.
  • Preparing compliance programs—and ourselves—for a future shaped by constant change and AI.
Bio

Amybeth Garcia-Bokor is a leader who helps organizations navigate complexity, build trust, and make sound decisions where strategy, governance, and innovation intersect. Her career spans government, private practice, entrepreneurship, and nonprofit organizations, giving her a distinctive perspective on how organizations grow, manage risk, create lasting value, and innovate responsibly in rapidly evolving environments. She currently serves as Senior Vice President of Legal and Compliance at Emergent, where she helps shape the governance of the emerging global market for forest carbon finance.

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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: Paula For the People: Let Go to Reach Further

What does it look like when your job title and your soul are perfectly aligned? For ethics & compliance officer Paula Young, the answer has always been simple: it’s about the people.

In this conversation, Paula Young and Sarah Hadden dive into what it really means to lead with humanity—how she earned the nickname “Paula For the People,” why she believes compliance is less about rules and more about winning hearts and minds, and what it took for her to stop being the person everyone handed work to and start being the person everyone looked to for vision.

A moment that has stayed with me is Paula’s story of a mud run she almost didn’t do. Standing at the base of a wall, covered in mud, holding on with everything she had—until her cousin screamed from the top, “You have to let go.” What she learned in that moment has carried her through divorce, reinvention, and every transition since.

We also talk about her work with Junior Achievement; her involvement with What Moves Her—a community that empowers women in leadership; and where she finds herself now: in a season of listening, learning, and gathering the courage for whatever comes next.

This episode begins cold—no introductions, no small talk—just Paula, at her most authentic, telling us exactly why she loves what she does. Enjoy.

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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: Culture is What Happens When No One is Watching

Culture is one of those topics in ethics and compliance that everyone talks about—but it’s also one of the hardest things to define and even harder to build. At Compliance Week, Lisa Fine discussed this with Amy Schuh, partner at Morgan Lewis; Kilby McFadden, Managing Director and Head of Investigations at KPMG; and Michael Ortwein, Chief Compliance Officer and Assistant General Counsel at GM. Today, Amy and Kilby continue the discussion with Lisa Fine and Sarah Hadden.

They start by discussing what they see as a strong compliance culture. As Kilby says, it’s what happens when no one is watching. The conversation focuses on how organizations move beyond policies and training to build trust, encourage employees to speak up, and empower leaders to make ethical decisions—even when those decisions are difficult.

Amy and Kilby share practical insights from years of experience leading investigations and advising organizations, discussing who really owns culture, how companies can create trust in the reporting process, and why relationships with the business matter just as much as policies and procedures. They also explore the challenges of building a consistent culture across global organizations and offer ideas for strengthening culture even when resources are limited.

They also include key takeaways for compliance professionals, such as the importance of listening, staying curious about the business, and building relationships before issues arise, and each shares one “myth” about Ethics & Compliance they think should be debunked.

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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: Seeing Compliance from Every Angle with Billy Jacobson

On this episode of Great Women in Compliance, Lisa is joined by a true “Great Gentleman in Compliance,” Billy Jacobson. Billy has been a leader in Ethics and Compliance for many years, as a prosecutor, a former DOJ Fraud Section leader, Chief Compliance Officer at Weatherford, and at private law firms, now as a co-founder of Jacobson Lopez,  a boutique law firm helping clients navigate ABAC, anti-money laundering, fraud, investigations, and compliance.

Lisa and Billy discuss what he has learned from these varied roles and apply this to how compliance professionals should navigate today’s evolving enforcement environment. He also shares his reasoning as to why organizations should remain committed to strong programs regardless of enforcement trends and the challenges of maintaining resources in a changing business climate.

Billy is an expert in the internal investigation space and shares his view on how AI and technology are reshaping internal investigations, why human judgment remains essential, and the importance of balancing efficiency with relationship-building across an organization.

This episode is not only helpful in thinking about your programs and the current global enforcement environment but also a reminder that you never know when you meet people—Lisa met Billy in student government in her first semester of college, and they are now talking about ethics & compliance years later.

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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: Raising the Bar on Compliance Training

What makes compliance training actually work in 2026? It has come a long way from the days when simply having a training program was considered enough. In this episode, Lisa talks with Kirsten Liston, CEO and Founder of Rethink Compliance, to discuss how expectations for compliance training have evolved over the past two decades and what organizations should be thinking about today. Kirsten discusses her experience in the compliance learning space and shares insights from her recent white paper, “Raising the Bar: A New Standard for Compliance Training.” She reflects on the best ways to create training that is engaging, relevant, and capable of driving real impact in organizations of any size.

Kirsten and Lisa discuss the growing focus on engagement and effectiveness, the challenges of reaching global audiences while maintaining consistency, and the importance of helping employees understand why ethics and compliance matter rather than focusing on the rules. They look ahead to the role AI plays now and will play in the future of compliance learning and why, even as technology advances, human-centered communication remains essential. This conversation offers both a look back at how the field has changed and practical insights for compliance professionals seeking to ensure their training programs continue evolving to meet their unique organizational needs.

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Great Women in Compliance

Great Women in Compliance: Wildly Effective, 10 Years Later

Author and compliance professional Kristy Grant-Hart on the 10th anniversary of her book. 

Sarah Hadden sits down with Kristy Grant Hart to discuss the 10th anniversary edition of her influential book, How to Be a Wildly Effective Compliance Officer. They explore how the compliance profession has evolved over the past decade — from a rules-and-regulations mindset toward a more human-centered approach grounded in influence, resilience, storytelling, and leadership.

They also dig into some of the book’s more debated ideas, including personal branding, visibility, networking, and whether being “wildly effective” requires becoming an influencer.

Along the way, they tackle burnout, resilience, AI’s rapidly expanding role and why human judgment remains irreplaceable. This is a candid and energizing conversation about what it really takes to thrive in compliance today — and why the future of the profession is bright.