Changing social norms
Transparency is at the core to combat wrong social norms.
Why do I say it takes courage? After all it is the new rule, it should be easy to speak up for it.
- Transparency
- Understanding
- Commitment
you need to enable your teams to do it. And for the difficult challenge of speaking up, you need to tell, teach and encourage your team to speak up. One way to enable your teams to speak up is to teach the skill. How to speak up without offending or attacking someone, while still creating a sense of urgency and importance, can be learned. And more importantly it needs to be practiced. Trainings we offer very heavily lean on practicing to get more comfortable to actually doing it in real life. The good news is, once you start yourself and your team on this journey, you enter a virtuous circle with every step reinforcing the process: We have now discovered, that one of the important behaviors for transparency and a strong risk & compliance culture is “speaking up”.
Are there other behaviors to create new social norms towards this goal?
Decision taking is another one
- The process how the decision is derived should be transparent!
- All the pros and cons should be heard!
- The reason for the decision needs to be understandable!
- People need to feel the decision is fair.
And how does decision taking relate back to social norms and more importantly to a strong risk & compliance culture. First of all, it is always a decision to take or not take a risk. Or to decide in the interest of the organization or in your own. Not taking a decision would be the ultimate problem, because the organization either moves to a standstill or all decisions are escalated up, which would create a bottleneck and severely slow the organization down. Therefore, decision taking is at the core of a risk & compliance culture just as transparency is. And, if you have an organizational culture, where everyone understands and aligns with the rules, e.g. acting in the customer’s best interest, and has learned how to and, more importantly, has the courage to decide, and does so transparently, you will create an organization of much greater adherence to the rules and at the same time of agility and coherence.
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