The Journey to Promoting a Culture of Compliance
NOTE: This handout is intended to complement the presentation “Promoting A Culture of Compliance” – it is really a compilation of influences and resources that may be helpful in any journey to discovering how to best promote a culture of compliance in any organization.
Trains and Babies
When I talk about the train station and the buzz created by the Super Bowl commercial commuters gravitated to over the weekend – this was a true “aha” moment. If I was going to “break on through” to the other side of the sea of white noise and competing priorities with any message about compliance, I was going to have to learn how to create something that would truly connect with people and make them feel something.
The World We Live In
How many work-related emails do you think employees send and receive a day on the average? How many memos? How many meetings? What portion of the day do employees have to process the barrage of information hurled at them?
Here are some statistics from a recent Wall Street Journal article that help put things in perspective.
Average time per day we spend at work handling our email:
2003: 17% 2009: 41%.
Average number of work emails received and sent by us in a day:
2007: 142 2011: 228
We are working in a giant white noise machine, with messages swooshing about us and popping up, vying for our attention. We agonize over whether our messages are getting through – then get annoyed, frustrated, or bewildered when they aren’t remembered or acted upon. We attribute our lack of success to disinterest when in fact it could be nothing more than employees being overwhelmed with information.
After my “train and babies” experience, I became increasingly more sensitive to just how many “bad habits” we all have in communication and sought out information that would help me and my team get better.
The following resources were and are influential in our revised approach to engagement and communication:
- Seth Godin
Godin used to be Yahoo’s marketing director. His biography reads like one of those people who take a degree in computer science and philosophy, add to it an MBA in marketing from Stanford, add to it schemes wherein $20,000 gets invested in something that ultimately yields a sale for $30Million, and you’re thinking “I hate this guy”.
But you can’t hate this guy, because he’s really good at what he does. Check out his books, Lynchpin and Unleashing the Ideavirus. He writes a daily message that you can subscribe to on his website.
Here is the link to Godin’s blog on really bad Powerpoints
We all probably recognize ourselves in that one (ouch!)
- Garr Reynolds
From another corner of the world comes Garr Reynolds. Reynolds is a former Apple employee who lives in Japan and has a website called Presentation Zen.
Reynolds writes about “professional presentation design” in a very down-to-earth way and sprinkles his website with good videos. He wrote a book called, The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides (Voices That Matter).
If you want to read his Top Ten tips on slide presentations, go here:
His presentation organization and prep tips are here:
If you learn best by looking at “before and after” comparisons, look at Reynolds’ work here:
- TED
TED is a website that is subtitled “Ideas Worth Spreading” (
TED’s subtitle echoes their mission: “We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.”
The website is a treasure trove of taped talks by some of the world’s foremost experts and speakers on an amazing array of topics. You can find Garr Reynolds delivering his talk on Zen and the Art of PowerPoint and other talks specifically on how to deliver your message, but watching how many of these presenters get their message across is inspiring and instructive. It’s easy to become a TED addict.
TED, by the way, stands for Technology Entertainment Design. The concept started with a conference in Silicon Valley and spread from there. Last counted, the website has been visited by over 290 million world-wide.
- The Heath Brothers: Chip and Dan
Chip is a Stanford Business School Organization Behavior professor; his brother Dan is a Senior Fellow at Duke’s CASE center which supports social entrepreneurs. Together, they are the co-authors of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Die and Others Survive. Both books are on everybody’s list of best business books of the year and if you’re really interested in their approaches to change and messaging/training, you should get on their website where you can download lots of info.
YouTube Clips
If you have some extra time and are a visual learner, the following YouTube videos are helpful in challenging you and your team to better engage and communicate.
A three-minute overview of “Making Presentations That Stick”:
Here’s another short one (about 4 minutes) called “How To Write A Mission Statement That Doesn’t Suck”: If you’ve written policies, committee charters, etc., you will probably recognize yourself and others in this video! When you get really good at this, you will be shouting out “10th Grade English Teacher” when you find yourself “leeching” out the meaning of a message.
Guy Kawasaki is another Silicon Valley graduate. He started at Stanford and went on to a series of jobs including a couple at Apple. He has a lot of good material out there on how to communicate and engage and how NOT to. Here’s a humorous but insightful clip he did called 10-20-30 Presentation Rules: His website is at A recent addition to his list of publications is Enchantment.
Here are some amazing examples of creating sticky message content:
(we showed this as part of a “Sticky Message presentation at Nemours, and you could have heard a pin drop. Same with this one:
“The real discovery lies not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
One of the most brilliant and effective ad campaigns Steve Jobs orchestrated was the 2007 “Think Different” campaign.
Here it is in case you’ve forgotten it:
But how do you “think different”? Here are two things that helped (and help) us everyday.
1. Vuja De (No, that’s not a typo.)
Jobs’ “Think Different” campaign is Apple’s version of Bill Taylor’s exhortation to “Vuja De” (Practically Radical: Not So Crazy Ways to Change Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry and Challenge Yourself). Tom Kelley echoes the need to “vuja de” in his book The Ten Faces of Innovation. (NOTE: Taylor is the founder of the magazine Fast Company; Kelley was with IDEO, the much-lauded design firm.)
Vuja de is when you are looking at something you’ve seen before, done before – and suddenly, you are looking at it as though new lenses. You see things you didn’t see before.
But how do you really do that? How do we unlock “vuja de” so that we can truly see things without the blinders that have descended on us through experience, reinforced by what everyone is telling us and everyone else is doing?
TIPS for kindling VUJA DE (courtesy of Bill Taylor):
- Go backwards. Look at what you’ve done or thought about doing in the past. What did we used to do that has been forgotten and is worth breathing life into again – maybe in a slightly different way? Why are we doing the things the way we’re doing them? Does it make sense?
- Go outward, sideways. Reach outside of your organization but more importantly OUTSIDE OF YOUR INDUSTRY. Cast the net as wide as you can to discover ideas that have been working well for others and could easily be lifted and imported into your way of doing things with little or no modification. Some call this LIFT AND SHIFT.
- Go inward. In diverse organizations, we can find all kinds of people who can act as great sounding boards/think tanks who can open our eyes about what we’re doing. We just have to create the opportunities, pose the questions, and then LISTEN. (The last one is easier said than done. Real listening is an art and one that requires a lot of practice. Just ask our families!)
The end goal of vuja de is to RE-IMAGINE. It’s about taking something we are doing by rote and genuinely changing how we think about it. Capturing vuja de allows us to go three dimensional – it lifts us out of our seats and allows us to swirl around the topic we’re exploring and see the possibilities.
For me, being able to “re-imagine” the story of what compliance and ethics is about at Nemours was a first step in creating the video I ultimately presented to our Board: protecting the legacy and amazing gift of Alfred I. duPont. The pictures I chose for the video were intended to show the long legacy – the gift –brought to life by a building in which excellent, caring treatment is given to patients and their families. But the gift is ever in peril – and that is our duty – to protect it. And part of protecting it is “trusting your gut, raising your hand, and being accountable”.
2. Pay attention to design: design is everything.
“To design something well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take time to do that”.
Steve Jobs, Wired, February 199
Where Steve Jobs really excelled at design was his intuitive understanding of where it starts, which is asking and answering the one question that matters most to your audience:
WHY?
Why should the leaders and employees and Board members of your organization care? (Hard to face fact: your caring and your vision doesn’t translate instantly into other people caring and their vision.) There are lots of priorities, countless emails and communications bombarding these people and competing for their attention. Why should the topic of compliance and ethics or audit findings bubble to the top? To put it bluntly: what’s in it for them?
Jobs understood the “what’s in it for them”. It is one of the reasons he was a phenomenal communicator and designer. He advocated that the design of Apple products had to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.
What’s in it for your Board members may not be what resonates with your front-line employees or your senior leaders or middle managers. You have to be willing to adapt and frame your communications to what fits your audience: are they looking to be inspired to take the moral higher ground? Are they looking for subject matter expertise that makes their jobs easier? Are they looking for easy-to-use tools that help them monitor their operations? Compliance and ethics can’t be about you – it has to be about them.
The “why” question can be obscured because no one is going to come right out and say “I don’t care about compliance and ethics.” Answering the question why requires empathy and listening and observing and being tuned into what makes your organization tick.
It’s tempting to skip the “why” question and jump ahead to designing the p’s (processes and the policies). Don’t. The time spent here in answering the one question that really matters will make the difference in whether people engage and promote and live your message because it resonated with them – or they will see “compliance and ethics” as something people like you do.
The “fire and brimstone” answer to the question “why?” rarely works in my experience. People don’t really visualize themselves as going to jail, getting caught, etc. They see that happening to other people.
When I sat down to create the “What Compliance and Ethics is Really About” video, I kept asking myself “why? What does the audience care about?” And it seemed to me that what they cared about was patient care and the ability to keep doing it. That is where compliance and speaking up about issues so they can be resolved and so the duPont legacy is preserved comes in.
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