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Trekking Through Compliance

Trekking Through Compliance – Episode 32 – Leadership Lessons from The Changeling

In this episode of Trekking Through Compliance, we consider the compliance lessons from the episode The Changeling, which aired on September 29, 1967, and occurred on Star Date 3451.9.

The Enterprise encounters a probe that identifies itself as Nomad. The probe believes that Kirk is its creator. Nomad says its mission is to destroy anything imperfect, including humans.

Kirk confronts Nomad, telling him his contempt for biological units is illogical since its creator is biological. Kirk then gets Nomad to admit that everything must be sterilized, which is in error. While attempting to consider the situation, Nomad is beamed into space. It is caught in a logic loop while trying to analyze its errors and finally self-destructs to “sterilize” its imperfections.

Commentary

In this episode of Trekking Through Compliance, Tom Fox explores the Star Trek original series episode ‘The Changeling’ and its valuable leadership and compliance lessons. Upon responding to a distress call, the USS Enterprise encounters the rogue space probe Nomad, which mistakes Captain Kirk for its creator and poses a deadly threat to the crew. Kirk navigates this crisis through strategic thinking and emotional intelligence, highlighting essential leadership skills. The episode also features noteworthy scenes, including one where Uhura speaks Swahili, leading to an insightful discussion on leadership takeaways such as empathy, situational awareness, adaptability, and balancing compassion with pragmatism.

Key Highlights

  • The Distress Call and Encounter with Nomad
  • Nomad’s Mission and Kirk’s Dilemma
  • The Final Confrontation with Nomad
  • Leadership Lessons from the Episode

Resources

Excruciatingly Detailed Plot Summary by Eric W. Weisstein

MissionLogPodcast.com

Memory Alpha

 

Categories
FCPA Compliance Report

FCPA Compliance Report – Dr. Karen Jacobson on Bridging Cultural Divides for International Success

Welcome to the award-winning FCPA Compliance Report, the longest-running podcast in compliance. Today, I visited Dr. Karen Jacobson, a renowned expert in organizational leadership and communication. She provides guidance for compliance professionals around leadership.

Dr. Karen Jacobson is a seasoned professional with a rich background in healthcare, public speaking, and business consulting. Her perspective on effective leadership and communication in diverse workplaces is shaped by her experiences in war, the military, healthcare, and even her time as a competitive amateur ballroom dancer. Jacobson believes that effective leadership requires understanding and adapting to the needs of different audiences, tailoring communication to resonate with them, and being culturally aware. She emphasizes the importance of leaders adapting their language and communication style based on the audience’s behavior style, emotions, and level of understanding and learning about the customs, language, and etiquette of the cultures they interact with.

Join Tom Fox and Karen Jacobson on this episode of the FCPA Compliance Report to delve deeper into this insightful perspective.

Key Highlights:

  • The Power of Active Listening in Leadership
  • The Art of Navigating Generational Communication
  • Bridging Cultural Divides for International Success
  • Developing Middle Managers through Targeted Training
  • Understanding Generational Values and Communication Styles

Resources:

Karen Jacobson

Website

LinkedIn

Facebook

Twitter

YouTube

Instagram

Tom Fox

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Twitter

Categories
The Circle of Gumption

The Circle of Gumption – The Great Debate

Zig Ziglar Said  “I Believe Man was designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness.” Kenneth O’Neal carries this tradition forward in his work and in this podcast, The Circle of Gumption, as he shows how maximizing your God-given talents and abilities leads to a successful, well-balanced existence in all areas of life. Join co-hosts Tom Fox and Kenneth O’Neal as they explore The Circle of Gumption to help change your life mentally, spiritually, physically, financially, and professionally by improving the health of your relationships with others and yourself.

Having meaningful conversations is a skill that many of us struggle with, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In the latest episode of The Great Debate with Kenneth O’Neal and Tom Fox, the two discuss the importance of having meaningful conversations about topics such as God, sex, money, religion, and politics.

Kenneth believes that people should drop all bias and prejudice when having conversations about these topics, and that words are only 7% of effective communication. The other 93% comes from body language, eye contact, and hand gestures. He also believes that people are afraid to have deep conversations about these topics and that there are two sides to everything and that people should read both sides before making a decision.

Tom and Kenneth discussed the concept of AIR, which stands for Appreciation, Inspiration, and Recognition. They also discussed the importance of responding instead of reacting when communicating with others. They agreed that creating an atmosphere where people feel secure and comfortable to talk is important. They discussed the concept of the Circle of Gumption, which is about using one’s gumption to think and have meaningful conversations. Gumption is the motivation to get up early and work hard on projects.

The two also discussed the need to have difficult conversations and to ask people how they can help support them. They agreed that conversation should be free of bias and prejudice and should be focused on learning and enjoying the conversation. Kenneth believes that 99% of people say they are kind, but actions often don’t reflect this. Intentional conversations should be focused on learning about each other and becoming friends. Leaders should have conversations with employees that go on all the time, such as asking about their weekend.

This episode of The Great Debate is sure to leave listeners with a better understanding of how to have meaningful conversations and how to support each other. Kenneth and Tom have linked to Kenneth’s website, book, and LinkedIn profile in the show notes for those who wish to learn more. So, if you want to learn how to have meaningful conversations and how to support each other, don’t miss this episode!

Highlights Include

  • The Great Debate
  • Gumption and Communication
  • AIR – Inspiration, and Recognition Creating a Legacy
  • Effective Communication

Resources

Kenneth O’Neal

The Circle of Gumption

Tom Fox

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Twitter

LinkedIn

Categories
Blog

A Listening Tour for Compliance

A recent Inc.com article caught my eye about a series of events that returning Starbucks Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Howard Schultz has been engaging in. According to author Justin Bariso, Schultz has been engaging in a “listening tour” of Starbucks stores, literally across America. According to Schultz, he told employees “We are traveling the country, trying to, with great sensitivity, understand from you, how can we do better.” What are employees telling him? Bariso wrote, “he listens intently to one Starbucks employee after another, a pained look comes over Schultz’s face. Employees lament about the lack of training, increased turnover, and extreme pressure they’ve been forced to endure as company profits soared, but worker conditions plummeted.”
This listening tour has several goals for Schultz. The first is that even though the company has sustained record profits, morale at the company is at an all-time low. Witness the unionizing efforts that have been successful. Employees are simply fed up with not being listened to. This has eroded employee trust and management and driven down the once vibrant culture at the iconic institution. In order to rebuild that trust Starbucks, in the form of their CEO, “must first listen.” But it is more than simply listening to rebuild trust, it is rebuilding employee engagement by making them and their ideas part of the solution.
Obviously, there is still much work for Starbucks and Schultz to do. Yet these initial steps can lead to real change. Schultz is doing more than saying “We Care”; he is modeling that language in his behavior. This is action at the top. It is also communicating to other senior management they need to listen to re-engage and to build back employee trust. Now what if a Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) took that same approach for compliance? My belief is that a Schulz inspired listening tour can add multiple benefits to your compliance program.
Engagement
Start off by meeting as many compliance stakeholders as possible. You can use town hall settings, or go smaller, meeting with key employee leaders, key stakeholders and employees identified as high risk who you can meet with individually or in smaller groups. Listen to their compliance concerns and take their compliance ideas back to the home office. After returning to your office, winnow down their ideas and suggestions to form the basis of enhancements to your existing compliance program.
After you roll out your enhanced compliance program with new training, you can then give specific examples of how employee input led to the changes in the enhanced program. This engages the employees and makes them feel like they were a part of, and had a vested interest in, the company’s compliance program. This employee engagement will lead to greater stakeholder buy-in.
Education
But during the town hall meetings, and the smaller more informal group meetings, you can do more than simply listen, you can also train. This training is on overall ethics and how the employees could use compliance as a business tool. Most business’s ethical standards are not found in an existing compliance program, they are found in the general anti-discrimination guidelines and ethical business practices such anti-competitiveness and use of confidential information prohibitions. Often these general concepts can be found in a company’s overall Code of Conduct or similar statement of business ethics; workplace anti-discrimination and anti-harassment guidelines can be found in Human Resource (HR) policies and procedures. Concepts such as anti-competitiveness and use of customer and competitor’s illegally obtained confidential information may be found in anti-trust or other business practice focused guidelines.
All of this gets your employees and other stakeholders to start thinking about doing business the ethical way. It is ethical concept-based training in contrast to a rules-based approach. Moreover, this lays the groundwork for the enhancement of your compliance program and the training that will occur as the enhancement is rolled out.
Risk Assessment
Now think about this same approach from the risk assessment perspective. Listen to your employees concerns and listen to the compliance issues raised. From there you can begin to ask questions about what was done and why. This approach is not adversarial or an interrogation, but it is ferreting out the employees concerns while having the employees educate your compliance team on the actual procedures that are used. By listening, and gently questioning, you should be able to garner enough information to create a risk assessment profile which can inform and even become the basis of compliance program enhancements.
Bariso concluded his article by stating, “People lose motivation when they sense you don’t care. But the simple act of listening creates goodwill. When your people feel understood, they’ll be motivated to contribute and can help you discover insights you wouldn’t otherwise. So, when it comes to solving your company’s biggest problems, don’t ignore your most helpful resource: your people.” It all starts with listening. Let your employees and other stakeholders have the “chance to share their problems, as well as to propose solutions. Meetings like these will reveal key insights, and they will transform your people from employees to partners.”

Categories
Adventures in Compliance

Adventures in Compliance: The Red Circle

In this episode, I consider the Adventure of the Red Circle and how it informs listening and communication in a best practices compliance program.

Shmoop found that in addition to the overall storytelling of Dr. Watson, “nearly every character in the Sherlock Holmes stories is a storyteller.” Storytelling is a crucial part of the entire detective fiction genre, and the Sherlock Holmes stories really explore this aspect. Each tale begins with a new case, which is always narrated by a participant, and ends with some sort of confession/explanation scene. While we are on this journey with Holmes and Watson, both they and we “encounter tons of different people and listen to their stories. In a way, the cases that Holmes and Watson solve are like giant umbrella stories composed of a dozens of smaller stories being told by a revolving door of characters.”
In the story The Adventure of the Red Circle, Holmes solves the immediate mystery in front of him, as told by the landlady of a boarding house. The first mystery is that a lodger has not been seen for over 10 days, always staying in his room and only communicating with oblique messages such as SOAP, MATCH, DAILY GAZZETTE printed on a torn piece of paper. But Holmes divines a greater mystery as it turns out the lodger is not a man but a woman whose life is under threat and her male traveling companion can only communicate with her through references to newspaper columns. Holmes stated to Watson, “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last. This is an instructive case. There is neither money nor credit in it, and yet one would wish to tidy it up. When dusk comes we should find ourselves one stage advanced in our investigation.”
This story illustrates a couple of key points for every CCO and compliance practitioner.

  1. The first is listening. Not only is listening a key part of any leadership skill but listening will bring you a much better picture of your compliance program, its faults and successes. The reason is that its own employees are a company’s best source of information about what is going on in the company. It is a best practice for a company to listen to its own employees, particularly to help improve its processes and procedures. This type of listening extends to an internal reporting system as a company should provide a safe and secure route for employees to escalate their concerns. Of course, the Dodd-Frank Whistleblower provisions also give heed to the implementation of a hotline.
  2. This second compliance point is communication. Just as education never ends for Holmes, it should never end for a compliance practitioner, your communications on compliance should never end either. Louis Sapirman calls this a 360-degree approach to communications.