Cleve Gibbon

Ethics and Compliance

The oversight of ethics and compliance programs is a core board responsibility.  A single corporate misstep today can result in immediate reductions in business operations and/or long-term reputational brand damage.  

Both are important but in very different ways.  

Compliance

A known set of rules, laws, regulations, and/or policies that are applicable to a group of individuals or entities.  

So compliance is binary in nature.  Your behaviors fall into one of two categories: compliant or non-compliant.  That’s because compliance is quantitative, objective, and black/white in its approach.  Being compliant means periodically determining whether you are, as they say, still on the bus.  

Ethics

A shared system of values.

And so ethics are fuzzy.  They require a higher level of judgment to determine whether individuals and/or entities share a common system of values.  Ethics are qualitative, subjective, and grey by definition.  Ethics pits your value system against someone or something else.  Comparing value systems is an important discovery through discourse.  Evaluating assumptions and getting real. Being ethical means continuously determining whether you are, as they say, on the right bus.

Ethics and Compliance

You need both.  However, employees are choosing companies that share their values.  Ethical companies clearly articulate purpose, have a point of view, and proactively go after it.  Where compliance enforces, ethics empowers.  Today, we’re seeing that ethics are multipliers to robust compliance programs. You need both in balance.