Creating an Ethical Culture

I had a comment I really wanted to try to get out, in response to Stephanie's question about lower level employees changing an issue of trust, or loss of trust. As I began to allude to at the end of class I came from an organization where this particular issue, the travel and expense policy, was huge. It was an understood element that the sales team often, if not always, took advantage of the expense accounts and corporate cards. The rest of us that travelled always tried to adhere to the policy or ask permission when we had to break policy, but the level of systemic dishonesty on the sales side, from senior management turning a blind eye, to mid-level managers being complicit, began to erode the policy across the organization. The on-going joke became, "I had a lot of snacks on that trip," because the snacks category was a $15 expense for which no receipt was needed. This made me very uncomfortable, but I had no idea how to begin to change behavior.

A good friend of mine, mentor and Director level in the department, began to help to change the situation. When she was first promoted to a manager level, she took an incredibly hard line on expenses for her team, really she was the only one who did so. This actually began to get her a bad reputation as a manager. However, what began to happen was across the board more people began to take the policy more seriously. Then informally at lunches and in hallways, she would bring up the policy, and how she felt certain  parts of the policy were unfair, but that they were still part of the policy and she had been speaking informally with the VP in charge about how some of these policies were unfair, and likely cost the company more on the whole (flying out of BWI, instead of Dulles or National, for example). She also began speaking about how undermining the policies, really undermined the company, and that the level of violation really didn't matter. Once she started speaking like this, a few of us who had felt really uncomfortable about the situation felt more confident in knowing we had a manager who agreed. As such, we felt more comfortable becoming her "disciples" if you will and spreading the same message. What we found was that many of us felt the same way, but had been afraid to shake things up, b/c it had begun to seem as if taking advantage of the policy was just the way things had been done. By beginning to  speak informally about it she made us all feel comfortable bringing up an uncomfortable situation. Our department began to change, and our overall expenses went down, not dramatically, but significantly. This made management happy, as we had begun initiatives to cut costs and improve profitablility. The issue was still prevalent on the sales side, but at least we had been able to enact some cultural change within our conusulting division.